"I should like to try. It may be hidden somewhere on the ship, and then
again, it may not be. But I should like to go over the ship with a
fine-tooth comb, and then I should like to go over _outside_,
thoroughly. Suppose you make me an emergency mate and give me a carte
blanche, sir."
Lawton got his carte blanche. For two hours he did nothing spectacular,
but he went over every inch of the ship. He also lined up the crew and
pumped them. The men were as completely in the dark as the pilots and
the now completely recovered Slashaway, who was following Lawton about
like a doting seal.
"You're a right guy, sir. Another two or three cracks and my noggin
would've split wide open."
"But not like an eggshell, Slashaway. Pig iron develops fissures under
terrific pounding but your cranium seems to be more like tempered steel.
Slashaway, you won't understand this, but I've got to talk to somebody
and the Captain is too busy to listen.
"I went over the entire ship because I thought there might be a hidden
source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to
turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under
the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably
could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And
there are bulkhead porosities which could have clogged."
"Yeah," muttered Slashaway, scratching his head. "I see what you mean,
sir."
"It was no soap. There's nothing _inside_ the ship that could possibly
keep us up. Therefore there must be something outside that isn't air. We
know there _is_ air outside. We've stuck our heads out and sniffed it.
And we've found out a curious thing.
"Along with the oxygen there is water vapor, but it isn't H2O. It's HO.
A molecular arrangement like that occurs in the upper Solar atmosphere,
but nowhere on Earth. And there's a thin sprinkling of hydrocarbon
molecules out there too. Hydrocarbon appears ordinarily as methane gas,
but out there it rings up as CH. Methane is CH4. And there are also
scandium oxide molecules making unfamiliar faces at us. And oxide of
boron--with an equational limp."
"Gee," muttered Slashaway. "We're up against it, eh?"
Lawton was squatting on his hams beside an emergency 'chute opening on
the deck of the Penguin's weather observatory. He was letting down a
spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning
horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet
of gleaming metal cordage.
Suddenly as he stared the drum stopped revolving. Lawton stiffened, a
startled expression coming into his face. He had been playing a hunch
that had seemed as insane, rationally considered, as his wild idea about
the bulkhead porosities. For a moment he was stunned, unable to believe
that he had struck pay dirt. The winch indicator stood at one hundred
and three feet, giving him a rich, fruity yield of startlement.
One hundred feet below him the plummet rested on something solid that
sustained it in space. Scarcely breathing, Lawton leaned over the
windlass and stared downward. There was nothing visible between the ship
and the fleecy clouds far below except a tiny black dot resting on
vacancy and a thin beryllium plumb line ascending like an interrogation
point from the dot to the 'chute opening.
"You see something down there?" Slashaway asked.
Lawton moved back from the windlass, his brain whirling. "Slashaway
there's a solid surface directly beneath us, but it's completely
invisible."
"You mean it's like a frozen cloud, sir?"
"No, Slashaway. It doesn't shimmer, or deflect light. Congealed water
vapor would sink instantly to earth."
"You think it's all around us, sir?"
Lawton stared at Slashaway aghast. In his crude fumblings the gym
slugger had ripped a hidden fear right out of his subconsciousness into
the light.
"I don't know, Slashaway," he muttered. "I'll get at that next."
* * * * *
A half hour later Lawton sat beside the captain's desk in the control
room, his face drained of all color. He kept his gaze averted as he
talked. A man who succeeds too well with an unpleasant task may develop
a subconscious sense of guilt.
"Sir, we're suspended inside a hollow sphere which resembles a huge,
floating soap bubble. Before we ripped through it it must have had a
plastic surface. But now the tear has apparently healed over, and the
shell all around us is as resistant as steel. We're completely bottled
up, sir. I shot rocket leads in all directions to make certain."
The expression on Forrester's face sold mere amazement down the river.
He could not have looked more startled if the nearer planets had
yielded their secrets chillingly, and a super-race had appeared suddenly
on Earth.
"Good God, Dave. Do you suppose something has happened to space?"
Lawton raised his eyes with a shudder. "Not necessarily, sir. Something
has happened to _us_. We're floating through the sky in a huge,
invisible bubble of some sort, but we don't know whether it has anything
to do with space. It may be a meteorological phenomenon."
"You say we're floating?"
"We're floating slowly westward. The clouds beneath us have been
receding for fifteen or twenty minutes now."
"Phew!" muttered Forrester. "That means we've got to--"
He broke off abruptly. The Perseus' radio operator was standing in the
doorway, distress and indecision in his gaze. "Our reception is
extremely sporadic, sir," he announced. "We can pick up a few of the
stronger broadcasts, but our emergency signals haven't been answered."
"Keep trying," Forrester ordered.
"Aye, aye, sir."
The captain turned to Lawton. "Suppose we call it a bubble. Why are we
suspended like this, immovably? Your rocket leads shot up, and the plumb
line dropped one hundred feet. Why should the ship itself remain
stationary?"
Lawton said: "The bubble must possess sufficient internal equilibrium to
keep a big, heavy body suspended at its core. In other words, we must be
suspended at the hub of converging energy lines."
"You mean we're surrounded by an electromagnetic field?"
Lawton frowned. "Not necessarily, sir. I'm simply pointing out that
there must be an energy tug of _some_ sort involved. Otherwise the ship
would be resting on the inner surface of the bubble."
Forrester nodded grimly. "We should be thankful, I suppose, that we can
move about inside the ship. Dave, do you think a man could descend to
the inner surface?"
"I've no doubt that a man could, sir. Shall I let myself down?"
"Absolutely not. Damn it, Dave, I need your energies inside the ship. I
could wish for a less impulsive first officer, but a man in my
predicament can't be choosy."
"Then what _are_ your orders, sir?"
"Orders? Do I have to order you to think? Is working something out for
yourself such a strain? We're drifting straight toward the Atlantic
Ocean. What do you propose to do about that?"
"I expect I'll have to do my best, sir."
Lawton's "best" conflicted dynamically with the captain's orders. Ten
minutes later he was descending, hand over hand, on a swaying emergency
ladder.
"Tough-fibered Davie goes down to look around," he grumbled.
He was conscious that he was flirting with danger. The air outside was
breathable, but would the diffuse, unorthodox gases injure his lungs? He
didn't know, couldn't be sure. But he had to admit that he felt all
right _so far_. He was seventy feet below the ship and not at all dizzy.
When he looked down he could see the purple domed summits of mountains
between gaps in the fleecy cloud blanket.
He couldn't see the Atlantic Ocean--yet. He descended the last thirty
feet with mounting confidence. At the end of the ladder he braced
himself and let go.
He fell about six feet, landing on his rump on a spongy surface that
bounced him back and forth. He was vaguely incredulous when he found
himself sitting in the sky staring through his spread legs at clouds and
mountains.
He took a deep breath. It struck him that the sensation of falling could
be present without movement downward through space. He was beginning to
experience such a sensation. His stomach twisted and his brain spun.
He was suddenly sorry he had tried this. It was so damnably unnerving he
was afraid of losing all emotional control. He stared up, his eyes
squinting against the sun. Far above him the gleaming, wedge-shaped bulk
of the Perseus loomed colossally, blocking out a fifth of the sky.
Lowering his right hand he ran his fingers over the invisible surface
beneath him. The surface felt rubbery, moist.
He got swayingly to his feet and made a perilous attempt to walk through
the sky. Beneath his feet the mysterious surface crackled, and little
sparks flew up about his legs. Abruptly he sat down again, his face
ashen.
From the emergency 'chute opening far above a massive head appeared.
"You all right, sir," Slashaway called, his voice vibrant with concern.
"Well, I--"
"You'd better come right up, sir. Captain's orders."
"All right," Lawton shouted. "Let the ladder down another ten feet."
Lawton ascended rapidly, resentment smouldering within him. What right
had the skipper to interfere? He had passed the buck, hadn't he?
* * * * *
Lawton got another bad jolt the instant he emerged through the 'chute
opening. Captain Forrester was leaning against a parachute rack gasping
for breath, his face a livid hue.
Slashaway looked equally bad. His jaw muscles were twitching and he was
tugging at the collar of his gym suit.
Forrester gasped: "Dave, I tried to move the ship. I didn't know you
were outside."
"Good God, you didn't know--"
"The rotaries backfired and used up all the oxygen in the engine room.
Worse, there's been a carbonic oxide seepage. The air is contaminated
throughout the ship. We'll have to open the ventilation valves
immediately. I've been waiting to see if--if you could breathe down
there. You're all right, aren't you? The air _is_ breathable?"
Lawton's face was dark with fury. "I was an experimental rat in the sky,
eh?"
"Look, Dave, we're all in danger. Don't stand there glaring at me.
Naturally I waited. I have my crew to think of."
"Well, think of them. Get those valves open before we all have
convulsions."
A half hour later charcoal gas was mingling with oxygen outside the
ship, and the crew was breathing it in again gratefully. Thinly
dispersed, and mixed with oxygen it seemed all right. But Lawton had
misgivings. No matter how attenuated a lethal gas is it is never
entirely harmless. To make matters worse, they were over the Atlantic
Ocean.
Far beneath them was an emerald turbulence, half obscured by eastward
moving cloud masses. The bubble was holding, but the morale of the crew
was beginning to sag.
Lawton paced the control room. Deep within him unsuspected energies
surged. "We'll last until the oxygen is breathed up," he exclaimed.
"We'll have four or five days, at most. But we seem to be traveling
faster than an ocean liner. With luck, we'll be in Europe before we
become carbon dioxide breathers."
"Will that help matters, Dave?" said the captain wearily.
"If we can blast our way out, it will."
The Captain's sagging body jackknifed erect. "Blast our way out? What do
you mean, Dave?"
"I've clamped expulsor disks on the cosmic ray absorbers and trained
them downward. A thin stream of accidental neutrons directed against the
bottom of the bubble may disrupt its energies--wear it thin. It's a
long gamble, but worth taking. We're staking nothing, remember?"
Forrester sputtered: "Nothing but our lives! If you blast a hole in the
bubble you'll destroy its energy balance. Did that occur to you? Inside
a lopsided bubble we may careen dangerously or fall into the sea before
we can get the rotaries started."
"I thought of that. The pilots are standing by to start the rotaries the
instant we lurch. If we succeed in making a rent in the bubble we'll
break out the helicoptic vanes and descend vertically. The rotaries
won't backfire again. I've had their burnt-out cylinder heads replaced."
An agitated voice came from the visiplate on the captain's desk: "Tuning
in, sir."
Lawton stopped pacing abruptly. He swung about and grasped the desk edge
with both hands, his head touching Forrester's as the two men stared
down at the horizontal face of petty officer James Caldwell.
Caldwell wasn't more than twenty-two or three, but the screen's
opalescence silvered his hair and misted the outlines of his jaw, giving
him an aspect of senility.
"Well, young man," Forrester growled. "What is it? What do you want?"
The irritation in the captain's voice seemed to increase Caldwell's
agitation. Lawton had to say: "All right, lad, let's have it," before
the information which he had seemed bursting to impart could be wrenched
out of him.
It came in erratic spurts. "The bubble is all blooming, sir. All around
inside there are big yellow and purple growths. It started up above,
and--and spread around. First there was just a clouding over of the sky,
sir, and then--stalks shot out."
For a moment Lawton felt as though all sanity had been squeezed from his
brain. Twice he started to ask a question and thought better of it.
Pumpings were superfluous when he could confirm Caldwell's statement in
half a minute for himself. If Caldwell had cracked up--
Caldwell hadn't cracked. When Lawton walked to the quartz port and
stared down all the blood drained from his face.
The vegetation was luxuriant, and unearthly. Floating in the sky were
serpentine tendrils as thick as a man's wrist, purplish flowers and ropy
fungus growths. They twisted and writhed and shot out in all directions,
creating a tangle immediately beneath him and curving up toward the ship
amidst a welter of seed pods.
He could see the seeds dropping--dropping from pods which reminded him
of the darkly horned skate egg sheaths which he had collected in his
boyhood from sea beaches at ebb tide.
It was the _unwholesomeness_ of the vegetation which chiefly unnerved
him. It looked dank, malarial. There were decaying patches on the fungus
growths and a miasmal mist was descending from it toward the ship.
The control room was completely still when he turned from the quartz
port to meet Forrester's startled gaze.
"Dave, what does it mean?" The question burst explosively from the
captain's lips.
"It means--life has appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside
the bubble, sir. All in the space of an hour or so."
"But that's--_impossible_."
Lawton shook his head. "It isn't at all, sir. We've had it drummed into
us that evolution proceeds at a snailish pace, but what proof have we
that it can't mutate with lightning-like rapidity? I've told you there
are gases outside we can't even make in a chemical laboratory, molecular
arrangements that are alien to earth."
"But plants derive nourishment from the soil," interpolated Forrester.
"I know. But if there are alien gases in the air the surface of the
bubble must be reeking with unheard of chemicals. There may be compounds
inside the bubble which have so sped up organic processes that a
hundred million year cycle of mutations has been telescoped into an
hour."
Lawton was pacing the floor again. "It would be simpler to assume that
seeds of existing plants became somehow caught up and imprisoned in the
bubble. But the plants around us never existed on earth. I'm no
botanist, but I know what the Congo has on tap, and the great rain
forests of the Amazon."
"Dave, if the growth continues it will fill the bubble. It will choke
off all our air."
"Don't you suppose I realize that? We've got to destroy that growth
before it destroys us."
* * * * *
It was pitiful to watch the crew's morale sag. The miasmal taint of the
ominously proliferating vegetation was soon pervading the ship,
spreading demoralization everywhere.
It was particularly awful straight down. Above a ropy tangle of livid
vines and creepers a kingly stench weed towered, purplish and bloated
and weighted down with seed pods.
It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor
which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension
inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute,
there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton
had ever smelt before.
The bubble had become a blooming horror sailing slowly westward above
the storm-tossed Atlantic. And all the chemical agents which Lawton
sprayed through the ventilation valves failed to impede the growth or
destroy a single seed pod.
It was difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not
harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the
unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a
thin diffusion of problematically poisonous acids.
It was no sale. The growths increased by leaps and bounds, as though
determined to show their resentment of the measures taken against them
by marshalling all their forces in a demoralizing plantkrieg.
Thwarted, desperate, Lawton played his last card. He sent five members
of the crew, equipped with blow guns. They returned screaming. Lawton
had to fortify himself with a double whiskey soda before he could face
the look of reproach in their eyes long enough to get all of the
prickles out of them.
From then on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers
while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch
attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the
ship's kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant
engineer leapt through a 'chute opening, after avowing that he preferred
impalement to suffocation.
He _was_ impaled. It was horrible. Looking down Lawton could see his
twisted body dangling on a crimson-stippled thornlike growth forty feet
in height.
Slashaway was standing at his elbow in that Waterloo moment, his
rough-hewn features twitching. "I can't stand it, sir. It's driving me
squirrelly."
"I know, Slashaway. There's something worse than marijuana weed down
there."