"Well, nothing very much. I felt this attachment on my chest, but didn't
think much about it. Still kinda woozy. I was halfway through
decompression. They keep a man there eight hours, drop pressure on him
two pounds an hour, nice and slow so he don't get the bends."
"Was this the same place they took you, when you met Ali?"
"Yeah, that was their decompression chamber. They had to make a sjambak
out of me; there wasn't anywhere else they could keep me. Well, pretty
soon my head cleared, and I saw this apparatus stuck to my chest." He
poked at the mechanism on the table. "I saw the oxygen tank, I saw the
blood running through the plastic pipes--blue from me to that carburetor
arrangement, red on the way back in--and I figured out the whole
arrangement. Carbon dioxide still exhales up through your lungs, but the
vein back to the left auricle is routed through the carburetor and
supercharged with oxygen. A man doesn't need to breathe. The carburetor
flushes his blood with oxygen, the decompression tank adjusts him to the
lack of air-pressure. There's only one thing to look out for; that's not
to touch anything with your naked flesh. If it's in the sunshine it's
blazing hot; if it's in the shade it's cold enough to cut. Otherwise
you're free as a bird."
"But--how did you get away?"
"I saw those little rocket-bikes, and began figuring. I couldn't go back
to Singhalût; I'd be lynched on sight as a sjambak. I couldn't fly to
another planet--the bikes don't carry enough fuel.
"I knew when the ship would be coming in, so I figured I'd fly up to
meet it. I told the guard I was going outside a minute, and I got on one
of the rocket-bikes. There was nothing much to it."
"Well," said Frayberg, "it's a great feature, Wilbur--a great film!
Maybe we can stretch it into two hours."
"There's one thing bothering me," said Catlin. "Who did the steward see
up here the first time?"
Murphy shrugged. "It might have been somebody up here skylarking. A
little too much oxygen and you start cutting all kinds of capers. Or it
might have been someone who decided he had enough crusading.
"There's a sjambak in a cage, right in the middle of Singhalût. Prince
Ali walks past; they look at each other eye to eye. Ali smiles a little
and walks on. Suppose this sjambak tried to escape to the ship. He's
taken aboard, turned over to the Sultan and the Sultan makes an example
of him...."
"What'll the Sultan do to Ali?"