Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

The webbing automatically retracted and they were all free to move again. Chung leaned forward, stretched in place, and then hesitantly got up, holding on to the chair with her left hand. It was odd to be walking again, feeling all those moving parts of the body, and trying to regain a comfort level. Still, training was everything, and within a minute or two she felt much like her old self again. She went over and removed the programming module from the bridge controls and put it in a small compartment inside her flight suit, and then she picked up her small case and walked back towards the lounge.

The others were already up and about, and the girls were more than ready to go. Still, Mary Margaret at least seemed surprised to see the pilot come aft, as if she’d forgotten that somebody real was actually up there. It wasn’t, after all, like they’d just had a long time in transit with Chung as company.

“Gee, I thought they was all big brutes,” she whispered to Irish O’Brian. “Most of the women we saw looked more like the men back there. She’s tiny .”

“Aye, but still bald, muscled, and with the expression of a stone carvin’,” O’Brian whispered back. “I guess they built her for speed or somethin’.”

“Naw. They’re gonna build her into the ship sooner or later, you wait and see!”

Murphy couldn’t help but notice that the girls already seemed to have put aside their fears and uncertainties and gone back to the banal. In a way, he envied them that. His stomach was already turning and he could use a good slug right about now, and he knew Barnum’s World and where he was headed. At least he hoped he did. These girls seemed to have the damndest knack of destroying his plans.

Lieutenant Chung went back to the airlock and pressed her palm on the identiplate. The lock hissed but turned, almost lenslike, then moved aside. The second did much the same, and when it, too, moved out of their way, the strong smells and hot heavy air of Barnum’s World came in, enveloping them like an invisible blanket.

“Jeez! The whole place smells like cow poop!” the normally quiet Brigit Moran commented in that high, breathless voice of hers.

“Yeah, smells like home,” Irish responded.

Murphy chuckled. “Ah, that magnificent scent of this here world isn’t just mere cows, girls, although there’s sure some of ’em about, nor horses, neither. You’ll see once we get out into the open and past these formalities.”

Some illuminated arrows on the wall of the docking bay indicated direction, and they turned, Chung as pilot leading the way, and headed for the customs symbol. Murphy went behind, then the three passengers, with Maslovic bringing up the rear. The sergeant wanted to make good and sure that he had the whole party in sight the whole time, even though he knew that any modern freight terminal like this one had to have full monitoring. He had seen these girls disappear from the state of the art in monitors before.

You could certainly tell that they had landed in the industrial part of the spaceport, if indeed there was any other part. The place was dirty, stained with who knew what on the floors and walls, and it looked like you could take your fingernail and run it across any point and come up with a large glob of unknown composition.

Once out of the bay and into the loading dock area, they had to go slowly and carefully to keep out of the way of robotic vehicles moving containers full of goods or running empty ones back to the various ships. There were also some really nasty-looking creatures about, most quite small and trying to feed on the dropped matter without getting squashed. These included millipedelike insects so large that a few were the size of human arms, with ugly pincers at their heads and giving off threatening looks; huge hairy spiders; lots of flies and roaches; and quite a number of scuttling things that looked not even close to anything any of them had seen before. The one thing that struck them all, though, was that the seamier side of wildlife on Barnum’s World seemed to be oversized.

“ Yuk! ” Mary Margaret McBride said over the din of port business. “I suddenly feel like things are crawlin’ all over me!”

“Just don’t step on anything livin’ or the remains of somethin’ live in them bare feet,” Murphy warned. “Some of these got poison. Otherwise, just ignore ’em and they’ll ignore you for the most part. They got their business here and we got ours!”

The arrows ended mercifully at a large set of double doors that slid open as they got to them and remained open long enough for them all to get inside.

“ Ow! ” Irish O’Brian exclaimed as her foot hit the point where the door met the floor. “What the hell was that? ”

“Critter barrier,” the old captain told her. “Just don’t step right on that place where the door’s kinda rubbed from openin’ and closin’ so much and you’ll be fine. It’s just a mild shock to keep them things from comin’ in with us.”

There was a second doorway forming a flimsy airlock of sorts just ahead, and from the ceiling a blue energy field, very thin and quite transparent, formed a kind of curtain they would have to pass through. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was doing; the carcasses of incredible numbers of flying things not only had piled up just in front of it but there was a constant crackling and buzzing as more things that made it past the ground barrier were stopped in midair.

“This one’ll tickle you all over,” the old captain warned. “But if ye think ye picked up anything, it’ll nail that, too. No hitchhikers!”

He was right. It did just tickle. Still, both Moran and McBride stopped ahead of it and seemed unwilling to go through, while Irish O’Brian hardly gave it a thought.

Maslovic smiled. “Come on, girls! It won’t hurt you, your babies, or anything else! Promise! But no more creepy crawlies,” he promised, adding to himself, until we get back outside, anyway.

Eventually, first McBride, then Moran, got up the nerve to step through, particularly when some of the large flying insects started making for them and their hair, and it was done.

The terminal wasn’t really a passenger terminal, either, although it had a small section for that. Mostly it was for captains of orbiting freighters to check in, get their records and orders and bills of lading straight, and to arrange to have whatever part of their cargo was destined for here off-loaded by tugs and delivered to the right docks or for the cargo to be picked up to be put aboard. Only small vessels like port tugs and the occasional shuttle came through this area; there was a commercial passenger shuttle bay on the other side for the use of such passengers when a liner or fully equipped passenger module on a freighter was available.

A woman with short hair and dark skin and eyes wearing a lime green uniform approached them, nodded crisply, and said, “Military shuttle passengers follow me, please!”

Maslovic couldn’t help noticing that the woman, clearly Customs and Immigration, had given a more than cursory glance at the three pregnant young women and there was a fleeting look of surprise, perhaps disdain, when she’d done that.

If anyone was here to meet the passengers, clearly they weren’t going to be wearing a uniform.

The young woman punched in a code and a sliding door opened on the far wall to reveal a moving walkway. “Does anyone need to sit down?” she asked. “You can pull down seats if you like from the far wall, but please do not touch the area outside of the walkway.”

The three young women all looked more than relieved and, when they followed the leaders onto the belt, immediately pulled down the hinged seats and sat.