I felt safe. Very safe.
The Insect Requirement
“Paul found one attached to his thigh,” said Dr. Beckwith quietly.
Captain Rogers’ body stiffened visibly in his pressure suit. “That’s it then.”
The two men stood in the tool storage pod adjacent to the ship’s engine complex. They both wore full pressure suits of stiff, crinkled fabric. They stood because there was no room to sit.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?” Dr. Beckwith asked. His breath blowing over the microphone poised in front of his mouth sounded like a strong wind.
Captain Rogers picked up a hand-held pneumatic drill and checked the digital pressure readings that glowed in red on the side. He held the drill to his chest and gripped the steel casing in powerful hands. His arm muscles bunched and the casing came loose with a jerk. A piece of black plastic from a ruptured gasket spun away and bounced off the ship’s hull. He could have used tools to remove the casing, but Captain Rogers rarely did things the easy way.
“We’ve lost too many men. We’ll have to leave.”
“But the contract-” began Dr. Beckwith.
“They didn’t pay me enough to die here. Nobody could pay that much.”
“It’s not that bad, really-we aren’t going to lose him,” Dr. Beckwith fought to keep the panic out of his voice. The muscles in his neck were stretched like guitar strings. When he moved his head pinched nerves twinged as if plucked by playful fingers. He rubbed and scratched his left hand through the thick material of his glove. He had to have more time.
They were in the first Earth ship to have landed on the planet, which they had christened Jade, the name specified in the promotional section of their contract. Although the executive who had come up with the name had never seen the world, Jade deserved her name. The newly-discovered planet was vast, tangled jungle. Huge land-masses of brilliant foliage dwarfed small seas. Seen from space, the seas appeared as silver-blue islands in an ocean of greenery. Above all, Jade was a world of wet, green life. An immense, tropical hot-house.
But in addition to the flora, particularly large and vicious insects had evolved. They buzzed and hummed everywhere. Every yard of ground rustled with them; they wriggled in ponds and darkened the skies with their bodies massed in overwhelming swarms. Some of them were as big as a man’s hand and just as powerful.
Captain Rogers gunned the pneumatic drill experimentally. The glowing digital readings fluctuated wildly, climbing up the scale, then dropping back. Rogers was a big man with bulky arms and shoulders. His pressure suit exaggerated his size, making him look like a massive white giant with thickly wrinkled skin.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
“What?” replied Dr. Beckwith.
“I mean Paul-how did the bug get into his suit?”
Dr. Beckwith waved impatiently at the air with his gloved hands. “I don’t know-he must have been carrying eggs or larva since his initial exposure.”
In contrast to Rogers’ build, Beckwith was a man of medium height with a bulging mid-section that barely fit into his suit. His arm muscles were like loose rubber-bands. He blinked rapidly as he brought his mind back to the present. He had been thinking about what Jade would mean to Earth. A whole planet full of living creatures men could eat without being poisoned. An entire planet to be homesteaded and explored. Back home there would be parties and bands. He could open a school of extraterrestrial biology. The colonists would name one of Jade’s mountain ranges after him.
“Is he hemorrhaging?”
Beckwith shook his head vigorously inside his helmet. He regretted it immediately, as fingers plucked painfully at his neck muscles. “We’ve got that stopped. He’s conscious, too.”
Captain Rogers said nothing. He finished adjusting the drill and tossed it back on the workbench. The heavy metal drill hit the table with a clang that neither of them could hear inside their thickly insulated suits.
Inside their suits the men were entirely self-contained. They carried nutrient pastes, air-compressors, waste-recyclers-everything. They had been living in their suits since the first day, the day they had landed, when the native insects had swarmed and killed most of the crew. That meant drinking recycled, distilled and body-warm water and breathing compressed filtered oxygen that tasted like hot vinyl. Beckwith and Rogers conversed by radio, it was either that or trying to touch helmets all the time. The only sounds that could penetrate their helmets from the outside came up through the soles of their feet, usually from vibrations in the steel-plex hull of the ship itself.
Beckwith scratched the knuckles of his left hand by rubbing them up against the underside of the workbench. He shook his head, although no one could see him. His neck twinged. They couldn’t leave Jade now, without the conclusive proof he needed. Everything would be ruined. He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably under the weight of his air tanks. Feeling a touch of nervousness, it seemed that he couldn’t get enough air. Quickly, he adjusted the oxygen-gauge on his forearm up a few hundredths. After a few moments he relaxed. For a moment longer, he listened to the hiss of his air-valves and breathed back in his own steamy exhalations.
“Let’s have a look at him,” said the captain finally. He laid all his tools on a piece of canvas and shoved them back out of the way.
Nodding his head sharply and ignoring the plucking fingers, Beckwith headed with hurried steps toward the bulkhead. Rogers followed at a much more leisurely pace.
The tiny medical ward at the heart of the ship was a tight fit. Beckwith and Rogers stayed in the corners, trying to keep out of the way. The nursing unit, named “Mom” by the crew, moved anxiously around the prone figure of Paul Foster. Her three multi-jointed arms independently, whirring and whining as innumerable electric motors and hydraulic screw-drives worked in unison. When either Dr. Beckwith or Captain Rogers got in the way, Mom politely bleeped and waited for them to move.
Technical officer Paul Foster lay on a stainless steel table. A thin sheet of sterile white paper separated his body from the metal. Tubes and sensory wires ran from where they were taped to pale, bloodless flesh up to a panel of self-monitoring devices that hung in festoons from the ceiling. As they watched, an IV bottle dribbled the last of its liquid contents down the tube leading into Foster’s bloodstream. A soft alarm went off, which was immediately acknowledged by Mom. Within twenty seconds the robot had replaced the bottle with a fresh one.
“He doesn’t look good,” commented Rogers. “I think-”
“It’s just the anesthetic-don’t think that he’s dying.”
Rogers shook his head. “Why can’t Mom just take that thing off him? Look at that-just look and think about what that must be like.”
Foster’s eyes were half-open, but glazed and obviously unaware. His dead-white arms were strapped to the steel table, so that he would not injure himself. On his exposed right thigh crouched an earth-colored lump about the size of a golf ball. Faint red lines traced up Paul’s leg from the insect, showing where its feeding apparatus were inside his arteries.
“Mom can’t just pull it off,” explained Beckwith. “See those cilia, those hair-like things around the base of it? If we even touch the carapace, it injects toxins.”
His neck twinged again, a twinge of guilt. He shook his head dismally. “I warned him, I warned them all not to use repellant that first day.”
He should have worked harder to impress the crew with his theory, but he hadn’t known what would happen. How could he have known? He squirmed inside his ill-fitting pressure suit. He rubbed the painful, itching knuckles of his left hand against the underside of the operating table, feeling the stiff fabric of his glove rasp on swollen flesh.