Unto My Manifold Dooms

UNTO MY MANIFOLD DOOMS Harry Harrison

One by one I dismayed them, frightened them sore with my glooms

One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.

from The Law of the Yukon, Robert W. Service

'Twelve, helmet lock,' Robson's voice rattled from the external speaker of his pressure suit.

'Twelve,' Sonny Greer echoed, glancing at the red arrows now point-to-point on the helmet and shoulder plate, then banging the closed latch with his fist. 'Aligned and locked.'

'Thirteen, bleed valve,' Robson read from the checklist mounted on the bulkhead.

'Thirteen, closed,' Sonny tapped the other man's suit with his knuckles.

'Fourteen, patch kit.'

'Fourtee . . .'

'What are you doing, Sonny, just what in the hell do you think you are doing?' Captain Hegg broke in, stomping across the airlock chamber towards them.

'Helping the prof with his checklist—I thought that was obvious, Cap'n.'

'Helping to kill him maybe. You are going to have to take this kind of thing more seriously. You didn't check that bleeder valve.'

'I looked at it, the handle is up and down like it always is. Closed—and I've never seen one of them open yet.'

'But you don't know until you have checked it,' Hegg insisted with slow patience. 'The handle might be broken, or turned a half turn.'

'But it's not, see Cap'n.' The tiny handle did not move when he pushed on it. 'So I was right all along.'

'You were not, Sonny. You did not follow checklist routine, that is all that matters.'

'Mea culpa,' Sonny insisted, raising his hands in mock surrender, grinning disarmingly. 'Have patience with my youth, Cap'n, and I promise never to do it again.'

'See that you don't.'

'You don't think I'm out to kill you, do you, Prof?' Sonny asked, looking ruefully away from the retreating back of the captain. 'If you were dead who could I possibly win a chess game from once in a while?'

'That's just Hegg's way, you know.' Robson's smile could just be made out through the thick viewplate of his helmet. 'He is really a good type, but terribly hardworking. He means well.'

'But why is it always my neck that gets caught in the bear trap when he is meaning well?'

Robson shrugged. We had better finish running through the checklist. I want to get those sample traps in before dark.'

'Right you are, Prof. We'll pick it up from fourteen.'

Sonny watched through their single-view port as Captain Hegg and Robson, slow and clumsy in their pressure suits, clambered over the nearby ridge and vanished from sight among the strangely earth-like trees. He shook his head, not for the first time, at the unreasonableness of it all.

'How about a grme?' Arkady called from his bunk, holding up his pocket chess set. 'I'll spot you a rook.'

'Why commit suicide? You even won that game when you had no queen.'

'Just your bad luck, Sonny. With a queen ahead you could even win against the great Botvinnik, may his memory be revered, if you would remember to just keep exchanging.'

'Yeah, but I keep forgetting. Look, Ivan Ivanovitch, look out there at a sunny day on Cassidy-2. Wind in the trees, grass growing, maybe just a teensy tinge of green to the air that isn't quite earthlike. Doesn't it make you want to shuck off your clothes and go out and take a walk?'

'Makes you want to be dead in five seconds,' Arkady answered heavily, setting up a problem on the board. 'The air out there is rich with deadly poisons and a mixture of hydrogen and methane that would burn with a lovely flame in this room. Or in your lungs. Even the stones would burn in our air. Look how wonderfully Reshevsky sank Euwe back in middle ages, 1947.'

'Aw, come on, you know what I'm talking about. I could give you lectures about the nrtural wonders of this world. Remember I'm the mineralogist here and you are just a thick-headed Russky mining engineer. . . .'

'I go back to salt mine in morning.'

'. . . I'm talking about romance, emotion, art. Look out there. A world as close as the thickness of this wall, yet more unattainable than Earth, which happens to be light-years away. Don't you feel it? Don't you want to go out there?'

'I go out there without my suit I'll be dead in five seconds.'

'You're an unimaginative clod. If you are the end product of the Glorious Revolution I say bring back the Czar.*

'Da. It's your turn to cook today.'

'How could I forget? I was awa'ice all night worrying about what to make for dinner. Will caviar go with beef stroganoff? Is the vodka cold enough?'

'Dehydrations and coffee will be fine with me,' Arkady answered imperturbably, concentrating on the chess board. 'You just torture yourself.'

'I'm worried about young Greer,' Captain Hegg said, after carefully making sure that he was talking through his suit speaker and that his radio was turned off.

'Sonny is a good chap,' Robson answered, plodding along at his side. 'He's not as young as all that either. He has his doctorate, he's done some very original work. I've read some of his papers.'

'It's not his work that bothers me. If he couldn't do it Spatial Survey would never have sent him out on this job. If there are the right kind of mineral deposits here he will find them and Barabashev will find a way to get the stuff out. I don't know anything about that, but I do know my job, which is running this expedition and seeing that everyone stays alive. And Sonny Greer is too careless out here.'

'He has had field experience before."

'On Earth,' Hegg snorted. 'Antarctic, jungles, deserts. Kid stuff. This is his first offplanet trip and he is not serious enough about it. You know what I mean, professor.'

'Only too well—since this is my eighth survey. And I am much more supernumerary than you are, let us not forget. The only reason the higher powers include a food-consuming ecologist such as I on these junkets is to stress the scientific value of new-planet work and to get a bigger appropriation come budget time. I have developed a very relaxed attitude towards this sort of thing from being on these expeditions, yet always being a bit on the outside. Give the chap enough time and keep after him. He'll catch on. Don't you remember me on my first expedition? Tanarik-4?'

Hegg laughed. 'How could any of us forget it? It must have been a month before the smell washed off.'

'Then you see what I mean. Everyone is green as grass at the start. He'll come around.'

'I suppose you are right.'

'There's something in my trap—look! A serpentoid and I swear—it has six legs!'

Two of the other traps also contained samples of the local life forms, and it took some time for Robson to poison them and transfer them to the sealed carrying case. There was no possible way to bring living specimens back to earth, or even to keep them alive in the dome with the restricted means available. The animals would have to be dissected and preserved in sealed plastic.

It was sunset when they started the trek back with the heavy carrying case, and it was dark long before they had reached the dome. But the directional beam came in clearly and the light on top of the radio mast was visible while they were still two kilometres away. Air might have been a problem, they were both on their reserve tanks, but they had more than enough left for the remaining time. The outer door of the lock was open and Hegg pulled it shut behind them, spun the wheel to seal it, then began the atmosphere evacuation pumps. Robson turned on the cleansing showers to wash away all traces of the alien atmosphere and soil from their suits.

The shower roared briefly, then died to a weak trickle.

"The tank is empty,' Hegg said, looking at the indicator on its side. 'Who was supposed to refill it?'

'Sonny—I think,' Robson said hesitatingly. 'But I'm not really sure of the roster.'