But Colonel Gottling proved himself very hard to like.
He was a huge man with a face like a skull, the horned helmet over it. He stood fingering the controls of his radar-horns angrily as Ryeland reported in on the teletype. "Hurry up, man," he muttered, and clumped out of his office, motioning Ryeland ahead of him. "You're next," he snapped. "Lescure had his whacks at the creature and he failed. They wouldn't let me handle it the way I wanted! And now it's up to you."
Ryeland said, "I don't understand. What creature?"
"The spaceling! The reefrat! The creature with the jetless drive."
Ryeland said humbly, "Colonel, I don't know what you're talking about."
Gottling spread his bony hands and stared at the ceiling in exasperation. "What under the Plan is this? What kind of idiots do they salvage for top-priority Teams these days? Do you mean you never heard of the reefrats?"
"Only the word," Ryeland admitted. "But didn't you just say 'space-ling'?"
"Same thing!" Gottling stopped in an anteroom, jerking a thumb at a file cabinet. He barked: "Here! Here's everything you want to know about them. Everything from resting weight to the chemistry of what passes for blood. The only thing I can't tell you is what makes them go, and I could tell you that if they'd let me alone with the thing!"
"But—"
"You fool, stop saying 'but'!" howled Colonel Gottling. "Look here!"
He opened a door. Beyond was a big room, once a repair shop attached to one of the rocket pits, now hastily improvised into a laboratory. There were unpainted partitions, unconcealed electric wiring. Chemical lab benches held glassware and flasks of reagents, reeking acidly. There were transformers; an X-ray generator; various bulky devices that might have been centrifuges, biological research equipment-heaven knew what.
And the lab was busy.
There were at least two dozen men and women in scarlet Technicorps smocks working at the benches and instruments. They glanced up only briefly as Colonel Gottling and Ryeland entered and checked in, then quickly went back to their work without speaking.
Evidently the cheery good will among the brass didn't extend to the lower echelons.
Colonel Gottling, in a good humor again, lighted a long, green-tinted cigarette and waved at the room. "It's all yours now," he grunted. "Temporarily."
Ryeland looked at him.
"Or permanently," grinned the colonel, "provided you can tell us what makes the spaceling fly. Me, I think you can't. You look soft, Ryeland. The collar has not hardened you enough. Still—Do you want me to tell you something about the spaceling?"
"I certainly do," Ryeland said fervently.
"All right, why not? It's fairly intelligent. Lower primate level, at least. It is a warm-blooded oxygen-breathing mammal which—why do you look that way, man?"
Ryeland closed his mouth. "It's just that I thought it lived in space."
Colonel Gottling guffawed. "And it does! An oxygen-breather, living in open space! Amusing, is it not? But it possesses some remarkable adaptations."
"Such as what?"
Colonel Gottling looked bored. "You should have asked Lescure these questions. I am a rocket man. But first, of course, there is the jetless drive. Then there is something else—a field of force, perhaps, which enables it to hold a little cloud of air around it, even out in interstellar vacuum."
Ryeland said thoughtfully: "Could the two effects be linked?"
"Could they? Of course they could, idiot! But are they? I do not know." But Gottling was mellowing; treating Ryeland like an idiot had put him in a good humor. He said condescendingly: "It is possible, of course. I have thought that myself. If the reefrat can accelerate its own body without reaction, perhaps it can also accelerate gas molecules cen-tripetally, also without reaction. How cail one know? But—
"But let us look at the spaceling," he said abruptly. "Then we can talk more better."
He led the way through the laboratory and out the other side.
They went through a steel door into a sort of airlock. Racks in the walls held bulky protective suits and red-painted emergency gear. A warning sign glowed on the inner door of the airlock:
DANGER!
LANDING PIT-WAIT FOR DECONTAMINATION
"It is safe," Gottling assured him. "The pit was deconned months ago, before the spaceling was brought in."
He pulled a lever. Motors groaned; the inner door, an enormous lead-lined mass of steel and fire-brick, inched slowly aside.
Like a Viking in his radar horns, the colonel stalked into the landing pit, Ryeland following.
The pit was an enormous circular cavern. Floodlights blazed on the blackened concrete floor. Even the decon crews, with all their foamants and air-blasting, had failed to remove the black breath of the jets.
Ryeland recognized it at once. It was the pit of which he had caught a glimpse the night before, with the Togetherness Girl. He lifted his eyes, looking for the sky and a settling rocket instinctively; but the dark armored walls lifted up into shadowy mystery. The cranes and the stages above were dark shapes in the dimness. No light passed the enormous doors, hundreds of feet up, that closed off the sky.
Gottling touched his arm and pointed.
Out in the black concrete stood a room-sized cage. Inside the cage was a pale cloud of greenish light; and in the center of the cloud lying motionless on the bare steel floor—
"The spaceling," said Gottling proudly.
It had struggled.
At close range, Ryeland could see how frantically fierce that struggle had been. The steel bars of the cage were thicker than his wrist, but some of them were bent. Red blood smeared them, and matted the spaceling's golden fur. It lay gasping on the stainless steel floor.
"She's skulking now, but we'll put her through her paces," Gottling bragged.
Ryeland said: "Wait, Colonel! The thing's injured. In the name of heaven, you can't—"
"Can't?" blazed the colonel. "Can't?" His finger reached up and touched the buttons of his radar-field suggestively. Under the triggering radar horns, his skull-like face glowered. "Don't tell me what I can't do, fool! Do you want me to expand my field radius? One touch of this and there won't be enough of you left to salvage!"
Ryeland swallowed. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the collar, with its eighty grams of high explosive.
"That's better," grunted Gottling. He clapped his hands and called: "Sergeant, get busy! Goose her!"
A Technicorps sergeant in red came trotting out of the shadows. He carried a long pole tipped with a sharpened blade. Black wires led from it to a battery box on his shoulder.
The spaceling rolled its battered head.
Its eyes opened—large, dark, limpid eyes—a seal's eyes; and they were terrible, it seemed to Ryeland, with suffering and fear. A shudder rippled along the creature's smooth, featureless flanks.
"Goose her in the belly!" Gottling shouted. "Mr. Ryeland wants to see her do her tricks!"
The spaceling screamed.
Its cry was thinly edged with terror, like the voice of a hysterical woman. "Stop it," Ryeland gasped, shaken.
Colonel Gottling blared with laughter. Tears rolled out of his piglike eyes, down the bony cheeks. Finally he got control of himself. "Why, certainly," he gasped. "You're next, as I said, eh? And if you believe you can tell us how the creature flies without even seeing her do it—" he shrugged.
Writhing on the floor of the cage as though it had already felt the prod, the spaceling screamed in fright again.
Ryeland said hoarsely: "Just make him take that prod away."
"As you wish," the colonel nodded urbanely. "Sergeant! Return to duty. And you, Ryeland, I will leave you alone with your friend. Perhaps if I am not here to eavesdrop, she will whisper her secret in your ear!" Bellowing with laughter, Colonel Gottling shambled out of the pit.