“What’s it going to do?” Jameson asked uneasily.
“Don’t worry,” Dmitri replied. “It loves you.”
There was a violent hiss, and Jameson felt the shock of something cold on his body. The Cygnan was spraying him with some foaming liquid.
It scooted round and round him, spraying every square inch of his body methodically, all the way up to his chin. It made him lift both feet, one after the other, and did the soles. It paid special attention to the crevices between the toes. Then it sprayed him all over again, with more personal attentions that would have made him blush if the Cygnan had been human. The stuff made all his cuts and scrapes sting. He stood there, feeling foolish, covered with bubbles from neck to foot. In seconds, the bubbles began to collapse. He felt unpleasantly sticky for a few moments, as if he’d been coated with molasses. Then the stings and hurts on his back faded and disappeared. The stuff hardened on the surface of his body, forming a transparent rubbery membrane that showed every mole and freckle. You couldn’t tell the film was there, except for the fact that it gave his skin a silvery cast, like scar tissue, and plastered down his body hair. On a Cygnan’s mottled hide, it would have been entirely invisible.
“So this is why the Cygnans didn’t need spacesuits,” he said.
“A spray-on spacesuit?” Dmitri said admiringly.
“Why not? What’s the function of a spacesuit, except to seal in an atmosphere, regulate temperature, and pressurize the surface of the body so that blood vessels won’t rupture? If Cygnan skin works anything like ours, it’s already a gas-tight membrane and an efficient temperature-regulating system. Except for a breathing mask, all you really need is’ a kind of support hose for the entire body.”
“Why didn’t the Space Resources Agency ever develop some kind of a stretch suit, then?”
“Too hard to get into. It would have to be some kind of shrink plastic that could only be used once. A spray-on’s the perfect disposable!”
“Tod, that thing could kill you! You don’t know if that membrane’s permeable to moisture! I don’t even know if Cygnans sweat!”
“I’ll have to take that chance, Dmitri.” Jameson flexed his arms and legs. The membrane stretched over his joints like a second skin. “I don’t feel overheated. I’m going to trust the Cygnans. I’m betting that the stuff conserves just the right amount of body heat and transmits the rest to maintain a balance.”
The Cygnan was earnestly trying to fit a plastic bag over his head. He waved her off while he stepped back into his shorts, less for modesty than for the built-in support they provided. Human anatomy needed a bit more help than the Cygnans’ smooth contours did.
Jameson turned to Dmitri. “Dmitri, I—”
“I know. I’d only be in the way. Don’t worry about me, Tod. I’ll stay here with Mei-mei until the Cygnans come along and put us back in the zoo. It won’t be a bad life for an exobiologist. It’s a fascinating opportunity, actually.”
He grimaced, then carefully sat down. The pain of his smashed bones was getting through to him, despite the pills.
“Janet will set that for you when you get back. Can you hold on till then?”
Dmitri nodded. “Sorry I can’t help. Sorry I flubbed it up on the ridge with my little hatchet, too.”
Jameson laughed. “You’ve more than made up for it. Thanks.”
Dmitri looked thoughtful. “There’ll be a lot for me to do here. We’re going to have to learn how to get along with the Cygnans. If they don’t have the empathy, we’ll make up for it. They’re going to learn a thing or two about human beings, too. We won’t stay zoo animals forever. We’ll breed—we’ve always been good at that. Too good. In another six-million years, who knows? Maybe there’ll be a new partnership out there among the stars—the descendants of free-living flatworms existing side by side in technological symbiosis with the descendants of parasitic roundworms.”
The tranquilized Cygnan finally put the plastic sheath over Jameson’s head and inflated it from one of the globular canisters. It was a tight fit, rather like a stocking mask, but it stretched. The canister stuck between his shoulder blades with an adhesive disk. A simple transparent hose connection, part of the sheath, plugged in to it. There was no provision for removal of wastes; Jameson suspected that the sheath was selectively permeable to heavier gas molecules. A careful squirt around the neck of the sheath sealed it to him.
Jameson sniffed the air. It smelled good.
The two pink pixies were urging the Cygnan into a sack. It crawled inside and curled up peaceably. The two humanoids crawled in after it, with a collection of air canisters.
They wanted to take it along!
After half a minute of futile gestures, Jameson gave in. He sealed the neck of the sack and turned to Dmitri. Dmitri’s lips were forming the words “Good luck.” Mei-mei was huddled next to him, big-eyed.
Jameson looked over at where Ruiz’s crumpled body lay. The gaunt profile, skin stretched like parchment over the sharp cheeks and the beak of a nose, stared past the metal ceiling, perhaps a mile overhead, to something unseeable beyond.
“So long, Hernando,” Jameson said. “You tried.”
With Klein’s gun in his belt and a Cygnan broomstick in his hand, he picked up the transparent balloon with its two or three pounds of alien life inside, and stepped through the lock into the dark.
Chapter 29
A necklace of people stretched across the stars. Jameson counted: twenty-seven of them, all holding hands. They’d turned off their thrusters long since. They were falling raggedly toward the spoked wheel of the Jupiter ship a couple of miles away—a circle drawn round a Y, shining with reflected Jupiter light.
He was riding the Cygnan broomstick backward, braking at a reckless quarter g, gripping it with both hands and clamped thighs to keep from sliding down the slender shaft toward the deadly beam of light that fanned out from its business end. The four-foot bubble with the Cygnan and the two humanoids curled inside was snubbed securely to the shaft.
The necklace was mostly blue, with nine white human trinkets spaced along it. Six of them would be the American prisoners, each sandwiched between two guards. That left twenty-one of them to deal with—including Maggie.
He eased down the thrust, matching velocities. The broomstick had only one control, a sliding stud that turned it on and graduated the thrust all the way up to one g. You pointed it where you wanted to go, and you judged your turnover point, by eyeball and by the seat of your pants.
The necklace broke up as he approached, turning into a random swarm, of blue and white manikins. Jameson slid the little flat pistol out of the waistband of his shorts.
He wondered what he looked like to them. He must be a startling figure, bare-chested in airless space, straddling a metal staff with a rainbow bubble shimmering at his back.
Suit jets flared, quick diamond sparkles against blackness, as the drifting shapes used their suit radios to organize themselves. Jameson was acutely aware of his nakedness.
At a quarter mile, Jameson switched off that frightening beam of raw energy. The prisoners were mixed up in the jumble of stuffed figures. He might have drawn his finger of light across his enemies, but the others would have sizzled and fried too. He was going to have to get in among them.
He twisted around, climbing the stick like a fire-pole, one leg twined and one hand gripping to give him maximum freedom of movement. His agility in the skintight sheath would be an advantage. He hadn’t realized it was possible to feel this free in space.