Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit up his
chest and over his shoulders.
"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogation
lessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help them
dump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see the
point? These are space ships. They're in orbit around Weald. They're
not manned and they're not controlled. In fact, they're nothing but
sky-riding storage bins!"
He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his arms
into the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air tanks over
his shoulder and hooked them to the suit.
"I'll be back," he said. "I hope with good news. I've reason to be
hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. They
have things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I'll find these ships
with stores of air and fuel, maybe even food, so that if Weald should
manage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they'd
only have to bring out crews."
He lifted the space helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested
it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from
the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his
eye-level. He fastened a space rope about himself, speaking through
the helmet's opened faceplate.
"If our friends should wake up before I get back," he added, "please
restrain them. I'd hate to be marooned."
He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space rope over one
vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him. A little
later Maril heard the outer lock open. Then silence.
Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out of
the ship to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for, and
what he'd found, was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could
imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine
falling a light-year.
Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic spaceship which
floated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts and
seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because of
magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsy
space rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's airlock.
Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the
second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very
small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing
utter silence from hanging intolerably in the ship.
Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the
four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd
gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control room floor, and
then paused for lack of any place to go or anything to do. He sat down
and began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.
Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.
"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.
She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a
human being. "No," she said unsteadily. "Not yet."
More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest
of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the
airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.
The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog
came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the
lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly
heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two spacesuits and a
curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside his
faceplate, and said briskly, "This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it,
will you, Maril?"
He began to work his way out of his own vacuum-suit.
"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practical
tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as
they're warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat
enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively
near zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."
He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where
their beams played. But the metal spacesuits glistened and steamed,
and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and
utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which
re-evaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was
immediately replaced.
"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit
sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping
friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble,
provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they
leave."
He shed the last of the spacesuit, stepping out of its legs.
"And," he finished wryly, "I brought back an emergency supply of ship
provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough to
feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still starving."