"Good. There's one more thing--how are our stores of medicinal liquor?"
Farley paled. "Captain, are you implying that _I_ should be running
short on alcohol? Where do you get off suggesting a thing like that?"
"I'm getting off at the right stop, apparently," I sighed. "Okay,
Farley, no evasions. In plain figures, how much drinking alcohol do we
have left?"
The quartermaster slumped a bit. "Twenty-one liters unbroken. One more
about half full."
"Half full? How did that ever happen? I mean you had some _left_? We'll
take this up later. I want you to run it through the synthesizer to get
some light wine...."
"Light wine?" Farley looked in pain. "Not whiskey, brandy, beer?"
"Light wine. Then ration it out to some of the men."
"Ration it to the men!"
"That's an accurate interpretation of my orders."
"But, sir," Farley protested, "you don't give alcohol to the crew in
the middle of a mission. It's not done. What reason can you have?"
"To sharpen their taste and olfactory senses. We can turn up or block
out sound. We can use radar to extend our sight, but the Space Service
hasn't yet developed anything to make spacemen taste or smell better."
"They are going to smell like a herd of winos," Farley said. "I don't
like to think how they would taste."
"It's an entirely practical idea. Tea-tasters used to drink
almond-and-barley water to sharpen their senses. I've observed that
wine helps you appreciate culinary art more. Considering the mixed-up
sensory data under transphasia, wine may help us to see where we are
going."
"Yes, sir," Farley said obediently. "I'll give spacemen a few quarts of
wine, telling them to use it carefully for scientific purposes only,
and then they will be able to see where they are going. Yes, sir."
I turned to leave, then paused briefly. "You can come along, Farley.
I'm sure you want to see that we don't waste any of the stuff."
* * * * *
"There they are!" Nagurski called. "Quade's footsteps again, just
beyond that rocky ridge."
The landscape was rich chocolate ice cream smothered with chocolate
syrup, caramel, peanuts and maple syrup, eaten while you smoked an old,
mellow Havana. The footsteps were faint traces of whipped cream across
the dark, rich taste of the planet.
I splashed some wine from my drinking tube against the roof of my mouth
to sharpen my taste. It brought out the footsteps sharper. It also made
the landscape more of a teen-ager's caloric nightmare.
The four of us pulled ourselves closer together by reeling in more
of our safety line. Farley and Hoffman, Nagurski and myself, we were
cabled together. It gave us a larger hunk of reality to hold onto. Even
so, things wavered for me during a wisp of time.
We stumbled over the ridge, feeling out the territory. It was a sticky
job crawling over a melting, chunk-style Hershey bar. I was thankful
for the invigorating Sousa march blasting inside my helmet. Before the
tape had cut in, kicked on by the decibel gauge, I had heard or felt
something dark and ominous in the outside air.
"Yes, this is definitely the trail of Quail," Nagurski said soberly.
"This is serious business. I must ask whoever has been giggling on
this channel to shut up. Pardon me, Captain. _You_ weren't giggling,
sir?"
"I have never giggled in my life, Nagurski."
"Yes, sir. That's what we all thought."
A moment later, Nagurski added, "Anyway, I just noticed it was my
shelf--my, that is, self."
The basso profundo performing _Figaro_ on my headset climbed to a
girlish shriek. A sliver of ice. This was the call Quade and I had
first heard as we were about to troop over a cliff. I dug in my heels.
"Take a good look around, boys," I said. "What do you see?"
"Quail," Nagurski replied. "That's what I see."
"You," I said carefully, "have been in space a _long_ time. Look again."
"I see our old buddy, Quail."
I took another slosh of burgundy and peered up ahead. It _was_ Quade. A
man in a spacesuit, faceplate in the dust, two hundred yards ahead.
Grudgingly I stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ridge.
A hysterically screaming wind rocked me on my toes. We pushed
on sluggishly to Quade's side, moving to the tempo of _Pomp and
Circumstance_.
Farley lugged Quade over on his back and read his gauges.
The Quartermaster rose with grim deliberation, and hiccuped. "Better
get him back to the spaceship fast. I've seen this kind of thing
before with transphasia. His body cooled down because of the screaming
wind--psychosomatic reaction--and his heating circuits compensated for
the cool flesh. The poor devil's got frostbite and heat prostration."
* * * * *
The four of us managed to haul Quade back by using the powered joints
in our suits. Hoffman suggested that he had once seen an injured
man walked back inside his suit like a robot, but it was a delicate
adjustment, controlling power circuits from outside a suit. It was too
much for us--we were too tired, too numb, too drunk.
At first sight of the spacer in the distance, transphasia left me with
only a chocolate-tasting pink after-image on my retina. It was now
showing bare skeleton from cannibalization for tractor parts, but it
looked good to me, like home.
The wailing call sounded through the amber twilight.