“All right. Still think he’s a man-from-Mars, Mac?”
“I don’t know. It’s too small to be a man, you can see that. And the memories aren’t like human memories. That’s all I know. Can we drill the tank some place?”
“Don’t need to,” Persons’ echo-distorted voice said from inside the air lock. The reflections of his flashlight shifted in the opening like ghosts. “I just found a drain pet cock.
Roll up your trouser cuffs, gents.”
But the oil didn’t drain out of the ship. Evidently it went into storage somewhere inside the hull, to be pumped back into the pilot’s cocoon when it was needed again.
It took a long time. The silence came flooding back into the tunnel.
“That oil-suspension trick is neat,” Martinson whispered edgily. “Cushions him like a fish. He’s got inertia still, but no masslike a man in free fall.”
McDonough fidgeted, but said nothing. He was trying to imagine what the multicolored vision of the pilot could mean.
Something about it was nagging at him. It was wrong. Why would a still-conscious and gravely injured pilot be solely preoccupied with remembering the fields of home? Why wasn’t he trying to save himself insteadas ingeniously as he had tried to save the ship? He still had electrical power, and in that litter of smashed apparatus which he alone could recognize, there must surely be expedients which still awaited his trial. But he had already given up, though he knew he was dying.
Or did he? The emotional aura suggested a knowledge of things desperately wrong, yet there was no real despera-tion, no frenzy, hardly any fearalmost as though the pilot did not know what death was, or, knowing it, was confident that it could not happen to him. The immensely powerful, dying mind inside the G-suit seemed curiously uncaring and passive, as though it awaited rescue with supreme confidence so supreme that it could afford to drift, in an oil-suspended floating dream of home, nostalgic and unhappy, but not really afraid.