He shut his eyes. I did what I could throughout, he said to himself. There was nothing more possible for me. I tried.
The squib hit, bounced, threw him from his chair onto the floor. Sections of the hull broke off, ripped away; he felt the acrid, acid-like rain pour in on him, drenching him. Opening his pain-glazed eyes he saw that the downpour had burned holes in his clothing; it was devouring his body. He perceived that in a fragment of a second–time seemed to have stopped as the squib rolled over and over, skated on its top across the terrain . . . he felt nothing, no fear, no grief, no pain any longer; he merely experienced the death of his ship–and of himself–as a kind of detached observer.
The ship skidded, at last, to a halt. Silence, except for the drip-drip of the rain of acid on him. He lay half-buried in collapsed junk: portions of the control board and viewscreen, all shattered. Jesus, he thought. Nothing is left, and presently the earth will swallow the squib and me. But it does not matter, he thought, because I am dying. In emptiness, meaninglessness and solitude. Like all the others, who have gone before this fragment of the one-time group. Intercessor, he thought, intercede for me. Replace me; die for me.
He waited. And heard only the tap-tap of the rain.
15
Glen Belsnor removed the polyencephalic cylinder from his aching head, set it carefully down, rose unsteadily to a standing position. He rubbed his forehead and experienced pain. That was a bad one, he said to himself. We did not do well this time at all.
Going unsteadily to the dining hail of the ship he poured himself a glass of tepid, bottled water. He then rummaged in his pockets until he found his powerful analgesic tablet, popped it into his mouth, swallowed it with more of the reprocessed water.
Now, in their cubicles, the others stirred. Wade Frazer tugged at the cylinder which enclosed his brain and skull and scalp and, a few cubicles off, Sue Smart, too, appeared to be returning to active awareness of a homoencephalic kind.
As he helped Sue Smart off with her heavy cylinder he heard a groan. A lament, telling of deep suffering. It was Seth Morley, he discovered. “Okay,” Belsnor said. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”
All of them were coming out of it, now. Ignatz Thugg yanked violently at his cylinder, managed to detach it from its screw-lock base at his chin . . . he sat up, his eyes swollen, an expression of displeasure and hostility on his wan, narrow face.
“Give me a hand,” Belsnor said. “I think Morley is in shock. Maybe you better get Dr. Babble up.”
“Morley’ll be all right,” Thugg said huskily; he rubbed his eyes, grimacing as if nauseated. “He always is.”
“But he’s in shock–his death must have been a bad one.” Thugg stood up, nodding dully. “Whatever you say, captain.”
“Get them warm,” Belsnor said. “Set up the standby heat to a higher notch.” He bent over the prone Dr. Milton Babble. “Come on, Milt,” he said emphatically as he removed Babble’s cylinder.
Here and there others of the crew sat up. Groaned.
Loudly, to them all, Captain Belsnor said, “You are all right now. This one turned out to be a fiasco, but you are going–as always–to be fine. Despite what you’ve gone through. Dr. Babble will give you a shot of something to ease the transition from polyencephalic fusion to normal homoencephalic functioning.” He waited a moment, then repeated what he had said.
Seth Morley, trembling, said, “Are we aboard Persus 9?”
“You are back on the ship,” Belsnor informed him. “Back aboard Persus 9. Do you remember how you died, Morley?”
“Something awful happened to me,” Seth Morley managed to say.
“Well,” Belsnor pointed out, “you had that shoulder wound.”
“I mean later. After the tench. I remember flying a squib . . . it lost power and split up–disintegrated in the atmosphere. I was either torn or knocked into pieces; I was all over the squib, by the time it had finished plowing up the landscape.”
Belsnor said, “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.” After all, he himself, in the polyencephalic fusion, had been electrocuted.
Sue Smart, her long hair tangled, her right breast peeping slyly from between the buttons of her blouse, gingerly touched the back of her head and winced.
“They got you with a rock,” Belsnor told her.
“But why?” Sue asked. She seemed dazed, still. “What did I do wrong?”
Belsnor said, “It wasn’t your fault. This one turned out to be a hostile one; we were venting our long-term, pent-up aggressiveness. Evidently.” He could remember, but only with effort, how he had shot Tony Dunkelwelt, the youngest member of the crew. I hope he won’t be too angry, Captain Belsnor said to himself. He shouldn’t be. After all, in venting his own hostility, Dunkelwelt had killed Bert Kosler, the cook of Persus 9.
We snuffed ourselves virtually out of existence, Captain Belsnor noted to himself. I hope–I pray!–the next one is different. It should be; as in previous times we probably managed to get rid of the bulk of our hostilities in that one fusion, that (what was it?) Delmak-O episode.
To Babble, who stood unsteadily fooling with his disarranged clothing, Belsnor said, “Get moving, doctor. See who needs what. Painkiller, tranquilizers, stimulants . . . they need you. But–” He leaned close to Babble. “Don’t give them anything we’re low on, as I’ve told you before, and as you ignore.”
Leaning over Betty Jø Berm, Babble said, “Do you need some chemical-therapy help, Miss Berm?”
“I–I think I’ll be okay,” Betty Jo Berm said as she sat painstakingly up. “If I can just sit here and rest . . .” She managed a brief, cheerless smile. “I drowned,” she said. “Ugh.” She made a weary, but now somewhat relieved, face.
Speaking to all of them, Belsnor said quietly but with firm insistence, “I’m reluctantly writing off that particular construct as too unpleasant to try for again.”
“But,” Frazer pointed out, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers, “it’s highly therapeutic. From a psychiatric standpoint.”
“It got out of hand,” Sue Smart said.
“It was supposed to,” Babble said as he worked with the others, rousing them, finding out what they wanted. “It was what we call a total catharsis. Now we’ll have less free-floating hostility surging back and forth between everyone here on the ship.”
Ben Tallchief said, “Babble, I hope your hostility toward me is over.” He added, “And for what you did to me–” He glared.
“‘The ship,'” Seth Morley murmured.
“Yes,” Captain Belsnor said, slightly, sardonically, amused. “And what else have you forgotten this time? Do you want to be briefed?” He waited, but Seth Morley said nothing. Morley seemed still to be entranced. “Give him some kind of amphetamine,” Belsnor said to Dr. Babble. “To get him into a lucid state.” It usually came to this with Seth Morley; his ability to adapt to the abrupt transition between the ship and the polyencephalically-determined worlds was negligible.
“I’ll be okay,” Seth Morley said. And shut his weary eyes.
Clambering to her feet, Mary Morley came over to him, sank down beside him and put her lean hand on his shoulder. He started to slide away from her, remembering the injury to his shoulder . . . and then he discovered that, strangely, the pain had gone. Cautiously, he patted his shoulder. No injury. No blood-seeping wound. Weird, he thought. But–I guess it’s always this way. As I seem to recall.
“Can I get you anything?” his wife asked him.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. She nodded. “Why did you kill Sue Smart?” he said. “Never mind,” he said, seeing the strong, wild expression on her face. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this one really bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before; it was dreadful. We should have been yanked out of this one by the psychocircuitbreaker as soon as the first murder took place.”
“You heard what Frazer said,” Mary said. “It was necessary; we were building too many tensions here on the ship.”
Morley thought, I see now why the tench exploded. When we asked it, What does Persus 9 mean? No wonder it blew up . . . and, with it, took the entire construct. Piece by piece.
The large, far-too-familiar cabin of the ship forced itself onto his attention. He felt a kind of dismal horror, seeing it again. To him the reality of the ship was far more unpleasant than–what had it been called?–Delmak-O, he recalled. That’s right. We arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer. . . we made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up. An exciting adventure turned into gross murder. Of all of us, by the time it had finished.