“This stuff is okay once you get used to it,” he told Lurr, waving his hand which had become sunburned since the start of the trip. “If you get me the recipe I’ll buy a restaurant with my gold when I get back, and make it a speciality of the house.”
“One of the factors in your enjoyment of the Ahtaur’s food,” Lurr replied, “is your ignorance of its constituents.”
Purvey broke off chewing and threw the remains of his meal into the highly efficient garbage disposal unit that Lurr had allocated to him for various personal uses. He stared at Lurr with brooding eyes, again wondering if he was being laughed at, and wishing he could lay his hands on a spraycan of paraquat.
It occurred to him that the leafy alien was quite different to what it had been at the start of the journey. In their occasional conversations, for instance, Lurr could print up his little messages faster than Purvey could answer them, and it gave him an uncomfortable suspicion that the mobile vegetable was more intelligent than he. Lurr’s movements had become increasingly more rapid until he could get around as fast as Purvey—another thing Purvey did not quite like. The only change for the better was that Lurr seemed to have got over the strange urge to drape himself over Purvey every time he slept. This made Purvey’s rest more comfortable.
On the seventh day it occurred to Purvey that he must be further from Earth than anyone had ever been before. Only two manned ships from Earth had reached Mars, so far, although there had been much talk of sending a third ship to see why the first two had not returned. And here was Don Purvey half way to a star …
“Just how far have we come now?” he asked. “Pretty far, eh? How many light years?”
“I am not used to calculating in your units,” Lurr replied. “The best approximation I can give you is … six light hours.”
“Light hours!” Purvey shouted. “But that means we’ve just crossed the orbit of Pluto. You told me the trip would take fifteen days. Half that time is gone and yet we’re still in the Solar System. What’s the game?”
Lurr did not answer at once, the first hesitancy for days. Finally, “The journey is in three stages. Getting clear of your planetary system takes up half the time, entering my own home system will take up the other half. That is travelling in normal space with standard drive.
“The inter-system jump—using Lurrian drive—takes only a few hours.”
Purvey rubbed his beard and grinned down at Lurr.So that’s it, he thought triumphantly. “The new stuff you added to this ship converted it from an ordinary planet hopper to a star ship. You invented it, didn’t you, Lurr? Of course! You just mentioned Lurrian drive. You’re all alone—there’s no big mother ship to look for you …”
The speed of the alien’s rush took him by surprise, and Lurr had almost reached the Ahtaur’s door before Purvey realized what was happening. He ran after it, muttering angrily, but one of Lurr’s tendrils flicked out and touched the red circle. As the door swung open Purvey tried to stop, skidded in the mud and went down heavily on his side. The impact of the fall drove the breath from his lungs.
Purvey gasped noisily as he saw the Ahtaur writhe into the room with unexpected speed, pale grey mouth opening and contracting hungrily. Enveloping it were faint, changing ghosts of formless objects created as its camouflaging talent reacted on Purvey’s whirling brain. He glanced around in panic, saw nothing he could use for a weapon, then scrambled for the row of lockers nearest to him.
He opened the door to a compartment, and found it was the one full of little glass blocks. The next one contained what appeared to be a complicated valve assembly, and Purvey snatched it from its brackets. The massive piece of metal almost wrenched itself from his grasp as he swung, but he managed to guide it down on to the Ahtaur’s back. The slug-like body burst open and the valve sank down into it. A bubbling moan came from the Ahtaur and the flickering images which had been blurring its outlines abruptly vanished.
Leaving his improvised club where it was, Purvey turned in search of Lurr. The alien was slithering rapidly towards him with a spiky, cactus-like growth extended in front of it. Purvey leapt back, realizing he should have been less squeamish about retrieving his club. He ran across the room, fumbling under his coat until he had taken off the belt of his trousers. It was of thin flexible metal. Gripping the buckle tightly, he turned and lashed out with the belt and, luckily, connected with several of Lurr’s upraised eye tendrils.
There was a sharp clicking sound as two of the severed eyes hit a partition. Swinging the belt with frightened, loathing haste, Purvey struck again and again until all the eyes were gone. After that the job was comparatively safe, but it took him half an hour—using the strip of torn metal from the wrecked part of the room—to make sure that Lurr was dead.
I’ll never eat coleslaw again, he vowed to himself as he gathered up the mass of still-twitching herbage and loaded it into the disposal unit.
The operation of the ship was, as Purvey had learned by watching Lurr, fully automatic. It was a relatively simple matter for him to cancel the instructions under which the ship’s computers were steering it out of the Solar System. On a little stylized model of a planetary system, in which a row of buttons was ranged out in a line from a glowing hemisphere, he pressed the third one out to designate Earth. He was betting that the ship would home in on the third planet of any system in this way. The fact that the computer was accustomed to Lurr’s home system made no difference because, even there, if the ship was deactivated for any length of time the planetary arrangement would have altered when it was put into use again, making it necessary for the ship to scan the heavens afresh and select its destination.
It was a first-class spaceship, Purvey congratulated himself, hundreds of years ahead of anything on Earth. For the gadget that made it invisible to radar alone he would be able to get more money than he could ever use. And without having to trust his life to any perambulating plant either.
When he had satisfied himself that he could control the ship he crouched contentedly in his favourite corner and had his first really peaceful sleep in days. On wakening he found he had a slight headache, which he wrote off as an aftermath of all he had been through, but it continued to get worse as the hours went by. After a meal and another sleep he had to admit, even to himself, that the air in the room had gone stale.
Looking around for air conditioning he found a little grill in the wall below each fan, which meant there was machinery to regenerate the air as it was used up, and that it had stopped working. Sweating a little in spite of the cold, he searched around and discovered a large duct leading into the wall. The duct emerged from a machine housing near the corner where Purvey slept. And going over to it he discovered a simple, deadly fact—the sides of the housing had been smashed in by the force of the explosion.
The air conditioning machine was wrecked.
Sobbing with fear, Purvey ran to get tools—then stopped dead. The realization came to him that even if the machinery had been as good as new he would still be in the same predicament. For when it was working it had produced carbon dioxide!
All at once he had the whole picture. Lurr had been a mobile vegetable existing by photosynthesis—converting carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, and giving off oxygen in the process. An explosion had wrecked his carbon dioxide production plant during the experimental flip in the star ship, so he had obtained a replacement—Don Purvey. That explained Lurr’s eagerness to lie close to him at first, and the excess of oxygen in the atmosphere at the start of the flight. It also explained why Lurr had speeded up so much when Purvey had been around for a while breathing out precious carbon dioxide. It had been keeping Lurr alive, and the oxygen Lurr had given off in return had been keeping Purvey alive.