Then he was stable enough. From then on it was just a matter of taking pulse and respiration and blood-pressure readings to satisfy the surgeon, and promising to get him back to the Spindle pretty soon. When Dr. Marcuse was through, still annoyed with me for not bringing Cochenour in for her to play with—I think she was fascinated by the idea of cutting into a man composed almost entirely of other people’s parts—Sergeant Littleknees came back on the circuit.
I could tell what was on her mind. “Uh, honey? How did it happen, exactly?”
“A great big Heechee came exactly up out of the ground and bit him exactly on the leg,” I told her. “I know what you’re thinking. You’ve got an evil mind. It was just an accident.”
“Of course it was,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that I don’t blame you a bit.” And she signed off.
Dorrie was cleaning the old man off as best she could—pretty profligate with our spare sheets and towels, I thought, considering that my airbody didn’t carry a washing machine aboard. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit another cigarette, and sat and thought up another plan.
By the time Dorrie had done what she could for Cochenour, then cleaned up the worst of the mess, then begun such remaining important tasks as the repair of her eye makeup, I had thought up a dandy.
As the first step, I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle.
Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. On the other hand, I did, a little. I wasn’t as tender as she. As soon as he seemed coherent I got him up, to try out his muscles—a lot faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though, and he could stump around on the cast. He was even able to grin. “Old bones,” he said. “I knew I should have gone for another recalciphylaxis. That’s what happens when you try to save a buck.” He sat down heavily, wincing, the leg stuck out in front of him. He wrinkled his nose as he smelled himself. “Sorry to have messed up your nice clean airbody,” he added.
“It’s been messed up worse. You want to finish cleaning yourself up?”
He looked surprised. “Well, I guess I’d better, pretty soon—”
“Do it now. I want to talk to you both.”
He didn’t argue. He just stuck out his hand, and Dorrie took it. With her help he stumped, half-hopping, toward the clean-up. Actually Dorrie had already done the worst of the job of getting him clean before he woke up, but he splashed a little water on his face and swished some around in his mouth. He was pretty well recovered when he turned around to look at me.
“All right, Walthers, what is it? Do we give up and go back now?”
“No,” I said. “We’ll do it a different way.”
“He can’t, Audee!” Dorrie cried. “Look at him. And the condition his suit is in, he couldn’t last outside an hour, much less help you dig.”
“I know that, so we’ll have to change the plan. I’ll dig by myself. The two of you will slope off in the airbody.”
“Oh, brave heroic man,” Cochenour said flatly. “Are you crazy? Who are you kidding? That’s a two-man job.”
“I did the first one by myself, Cochenour.”
“And came into the airbody to cool off every little while. Sure. That’s a whole other thing.”
I hesitated. “It’ll be harder,” I admitted. “Not impossible. Lone prospectors have dug out tunnels before, though the problems were a little different. I know it’ll be a rough forty-eight hours for me, but we’ll have to try it—there isn’t any alternative.”
“Wrong,” Cochenour said. He patted Dorrie’s rump. “Solid muscle, that girl is. She isn’t big, but she’s healthy. Takes after her grandmother. Don’t argue, Walthers. Just think a little bit. I’ll fly the airbody; she’ll stick around to help you. The job is as safe for Dorrie as it is for you; and with two of you to spell each other there’s a chance you might make it before you pass out from heat prostration. What’s the chance by yourself? Any chance at all?”
I didn’t answer the last part. For some reason, his attitude put me in a bad temper. “You talk as though she didn’t have anything to say about it.”
“Well,” Dorrie said, sweetly enough, “come to that, so do you, Audee. Boyce is right. I appreciate your being all gallant and trying to make things easy for me, but, honestly, I think you’ll need me. I’ve learned a lot. And if you want the truth, you look a lot worse than I do.”
I said, with all the contemptuous command I could get into my voice, “Forget it. We’re going to do it my way. You can both help me for an hour or so, while I get set up. Then you’re on your way. No arguments. Let’s get going. “Well, that made two mistakes.
The first was that we didn’t get set up in an hour. It took more than two, and I was sweating-sick, oily sweat-long before we finished. I really felt bad. I was past worrying about the way I felt; I was only a little surprised, and kind of grateful, every time I noticed that my heart was still beating.
Dorrie was as strong and willing as promised. She did more of the muscle work than I did, firing up the igloo and setting the equipment in place, and Cochenour checked over the instruments and made sure he knew what he had to do to make the airbody fly. He flatly rejected the notion of going back to the Spindle, though; he said he didn’t want to risk the extra time, when he could just as easily set down for twenty-four hours a few hundred kilometers away.
Then I took two cups of strong coffee, heavily laced with my private supply of gin, smoked my last cigarette for a while, and put in a call to the military reservation.
Amanda Littleknees was flirtatious but a little puzzled when I told her we were departing the vicinity, no fixed destination; but she didn’t argue. Then Dorrie and I tumbled out of the lock and closed it behind us, leaving Cochenour strapped in the driver’s seat.
That was the other mistake I had made. In spite of everything I had said, we did it Cochenour’s way after all. I never agreed to it. It just happened that way.
Under the ashy sky Dorrie just stood there for a moment, looking forlorn. But then she grabbed my hand, and the two of us swam through the thick, turbulent air toward the shelter of our last igloo. She had remembered my coaching about the importance of staying out of the jet exhaust. Inside, she flung herself flat and didn’t move.
I was less cautious. I couldn’t help myself. I had to see. So, as soon as I could judge from the flare that the jets were angled away from us, I stuck my head up and watched Cochenour take off in a sleet of ash.
It wasn’t a bad takeoff. In circumstances like that, I define “bad” as total demolition of the airbody and the death or maiming of one or more persons. He avoided that, but as soon as he was out of the slight shelter of the arroyo the gusts caught him and the airbody skittered and slid wildly. It was going to be a rough ride for him, going just the few hundred kilometers north that would take him out of detection range. I touched Dorrie with my toe, and she struggled to her feet. I slipped the talk cord into the jack on her helmet-radio was out, because of possible eavesdropping from the perimeter patrols that we wouldn’t be able to see.
“Have you changed your mind yet?” I asked.
It was a fairly obnoxious question, but she took it nicely. She giggled. I could tell that because we were faceplate to faceplate, and I could see her face shadowed inside the helmet. But I couldn’t hear what she was saying until she remembered to nudge her voice switch, and then what I heard was, “. . . romantic, just the two of us.”
Well, we didn’t have time for that kind of chitchat. I said irritably, “Let’s quit wasting time. Remember what I told you. We have air, water, and power for forty-eight hours, and that’s it. Don’t count on any margin. The water might last a little longer than the others, but you need the other two things to stay alive. Try not to work too hard. The less you metabolize, the less your waste-disposal system has to handle. If we find a tunnel and get in, maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there—provided the tunnel’s unbreached and hasn’t heated up too much in the last couple hundred thousand years. Otherwise, don’t even think about food. As to sleeping, forget it; maybe while the drills are going we can catch a couple of naps, but—”