Lundy looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as
though they saw anything. He was shivering.
"I can't leave the controls, Jackie."
"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that
long."
* * * * *
Lundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding about the cold. The
temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation colonists sensitive
to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With the wound and
all, Smith might, wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.
"Okay." Lundy reached out and closed the switch marked A. "But I'll let
Mike do the flying. He can probably last five minutes before he blows
his guts out."
Iron Mike was just a pattycake when it came to Venusian atmosphere
flying. The constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to
the fusing point in practically no time at all.
Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to know there were still a
couple of things men could do better than machinery.
He got up, feeling like something that had stood outside rusting for
four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head. Lundy growled at
him.
"Next time, sonny, you wear your long woolen undies and let me alone!"
Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach. Cold sweat
needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.
Farrell had quit screaming.
There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were
outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had
stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door. Two steps.
It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.
Farrell was standing in the opening. A nice guy with a wife and two
kids. His face still looked like that, but the eyes in it were not
sane, nor even human.
Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four heavy straps. Breast,
belly, thighs, and feet. The marks of them were on Farrell. They were
cut into his shirt and pants, into his flesh and sinew, deep enough
to show his bare white ribs. There was blood. A lot of blood. Farrell
didn't mind.
"I broke the straps," he said. He smiled at Lundy. "She called me and I
broke the straps."
He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged
and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet to
moving.
Jackie Smith said quietly, "Hold it, Midget. She doesn't like it there
in the safe. She's cold, and she wants to come out."
* * * * *
Lundy looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat,
holding the needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His
pale green eyes had a distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than
to trust it.