CHAPTER TWELVE
Dan
A while later-he had no idea quite how long it had been- Dannerman blinked and opened his eyes. The other four were stirring around him, and they all looked bewildered. They were in the Clipper, though Dannerman didn’t remember going there. He had a recollection of his gun being in his hand, though he wasn’t sure why. He glanced hastily around, in case it was floating in the nearby air. It wasn’t. He observed General Delasquez looking around in the same befuddled way, and, beyond him, Jimmy Lin, looking perturbed as he rubbed the side of his head. “What the hell happened?” he asked.
Rosaleen Artzybachova said shakily, “I think I must have had a touch of micro-G vertigo.”
It looked to Dannerman as though they all had. Everyone seemed dazed, and Pat was weeping softly. “All for nothing,” she whimpered. “Hell.”
Jimmy Lin said pensively, “Bad enough there wasn’t any of that alien technology; even Starlab’s own equipment is ruined.”
“Ruined,” Rosaleen Artzybachova echoed. She sounded more than dazed, Dannerman thought; in fact, really ill. It was her age, most likely, he decided. But she kept on doggedly with the litany of loss: “Electronics fused, power supply ruined-there must’ve been a plasma arc. A big one. There’s nothing left worth salvaging. Might as well start back. We can’t do any good here.”
Dannerman was scratching the back of his neck-as, for some reason, so were the others-as he was peering into the pilots’ screen at Starlab’s hull. He pointed at the bulge that had no business being there. “I really thought that was going to be something interesting,” he said.
“Just some kind of sticky space glop, I guess,” Jimmy Lin said. “All right, get strapped in. We’re ready to undock.”
Despondently, the five of them took their places, ready for the long return flight to Earth. . . .
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dan
And at the same time, but a very long way away, Dannerman blinked and opened his eyes . . . and squawked in unbelieving outrage. In a place he had never seen before, he was being held firmly by two people in Hallowe’en trick-or-treat dress-big ones, with a froth of white concealing their faces and an astonishing number of arms-while a smaller one in a different costume was interestedly, but inexpertly, undoing the flaps of his clothing to undress him. Shouting around him made him look about; all four of his companions were similarly held and two of them, Jimmy Lin and Pat, were already naked. He bellowed, “What the hell happened!”
He wasn’t asking anyone in particular, but the goblin who was taking his clothes off gave him an answer-sort of an answer. It seemed to have the body of a large chicken; it gazed up at him out of mournful huge kitten’s eyes and worked its slack jaw for a moment, and then it spoke. “Do not struggle. The handlers may damage you.”
And Pat Adcock cried, half laughing, “My God, Dan! It’s Dopey!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pat
Yes, the chicken with the cat’s face did look like the Dopey the transmission from space had warned against; and the pale, bearded giant that never spoke was likely enough the Doc; and that was a subject for wonder; but Pat had other things on her mind. Pat Adcock had had fondly held hopes blighted before. Never like this. She had been so close! After all those interminable, exhausting weeks of court battles and conspiracy there had been that one great, exultant moment when it looked as though all her dreams were paying off. . . .
And then, bam, reality hit her right between the eyes and these bizarre creatures from a nightmare had snatched all the triumphs away.
But it wasn’t a nightmare. Even that consolation was denied her. Improbable as it was, the Dopey was real, the whiskered Doc was real, the space aliens truly did exist and they had taken Pat Adcock prisoner. It was almost more than she could take in-the astonishment, the incredible strangeness of it all-but the wonder was diluted by fear. And diluted again by discomforts of several kinds, including her increasingly urgent need to go to the bathroom.
It was all more than she could handle, because nothing like this captivity had ever happened to Pat before. She had never been in jail. She had never in her life been restrained against her will in any way at all, unless you counted the times her nanny had made her sit in a corner for some five-year-old’s wickedness. She wasn’t prepared for it, and she didn’t like it at all. She didn’t like the six-sided chamber that was their prison, like a scaled-up honeycomb cell the size of a backyard swimming pool, or the bright mirrored surfaces that reflected their own naked bodies whichever way they looked. She didn’t like being naked, for that matter-at least, not under these circumstances. Pat was not a prude about her body, but she had always been selective about whom she displayed it to. She especially didn’t like the fact that there were no private spaces inside the cell, not even a toilet. About that she was, indeed, quite prudish.
She was not the only one suffering from affronted modesty. That dedicated sexual athlete, Jimmy Peng-tsu Lin, sat with his back against a wall, his bloodied head down in shame, hugging his knees to his chest to conceal as much of his privacy as possible. Dannerman and the general were less obvious in their discomfort, though the general, she saw, had a lot to be discomforted about. Lacking the built-in corsets of his uniform, his body sagged and bulged in unexpected ways. Both men, she observed, did their best to turn away from whomever they were talking to. Only Rosaleen Artzybachova seemed unaffected- very likely, Pat thought with interest, because she stripped down pretty well, for a woman of that age. All that exercise appeared to have paid off. Pat resolved to try a bit more of it for herself when she was back in her real life….
If she ever was.
There did not seem to be a very high probability of that. They were well and truly captured, all five of them.
They were all responding in the same way, too. All five of them-well, all but Jimmy Lin, who was fully occupied in nursing his bashed head and his embarrassed nudity-had immediately begun to check the mirrored wall, centimeter by centimeter, looking for a doorway, perhaps, or at least some sort of gap. There wasn’t any. “I guess we’re stuck here,” Dannerman said at last, and no one disagreed. All they could do was ask each other unanswerable questions and complain-“pissing and moaning” was the term Dannerman had used. It wasn’t a good choice of words. Pat was uncomfortably aware that they had so far really done only the moaning part.
From all the questions a few facts were established early. They certainly were not on Starlab anymore, because gravity pressed them down as it had on Earth. They almost certainly were not on their own Earth, either, because of that same gravity. It was Rosaleen Artzybachova who noticed it first, but then they all agreed. They seemed to weigh a little less, pressed a little less heavily on the soles of their feet when they stood, perhaps could even jump just a bit higher, than they had for all their previous lives.
“Also,” Rosaleen went on, “you will notice that we are breathing quite normally.”
Pat frowned. “Yes?”
“Which means that the atmosphere here contains approximately an Earth-normal partial pressure of oxygen. I imagine the rest is probably nitrogen. Some inert gas, at any rate; and not helium or carbon dioxide, because we would know it if so, from the effects on our voices or our alertness. All the other inert gases are comparatively rare, so I believe,” she said thoughtfully, “that it must be nitrogen.” She reflected for a moment, then added, “The temperature is a bit warm-more like North Africa than New York, I would say-but still in a livable range.”
Jimmy Lin looked up at her to make a face. “So, Dr. Artzybachova, put it all together and tell us what we need to know. Where are we?”
“Not on Earth, of course,” she said at once. “Perhaps we are on a planet, I am not sure of that, but in any case not a planet of our own solar system-too much gravity for Mars or Mercury, not enough for any of the gas giants. And, of course, not on Venus, because the heat would have killed us at once. There are other possibilities. Perhaps we could be on a spaceship undergoing constant acceleration, but I doubt that also-I believe we would hear the rockets.”
“If they use rockets,” Dannerman offered.
“A good point,” Rosaleen agreed. “But I think I do hear something. Perhaps motors somewhere? It doesn’t sound like rocket engines. So we come back to the one clear fact: we are not on Earth.”