Pohl, Frederik - The Gateway Trip

"Sounds pretty chancy," Cochenour observed, but he was looking at Dorrie, not at me. She shrugged.

"I didn't say it was a guarantee," I told him. "I only said it was a chance."

I was beginning to think very well of Dorotha Keefer. She was a pretty nice person, considering her age and circumstances, and smart and strong, too. But one thing she lacked was self-confidence.

She had just never been trained to it. She had been getting it as a prosthesis-from Cochenour most recently, I supposed, before that maybe whoever preceded Cochenour in her life-at her age, perhaps that had been her father. She had the air of somebody who'd been surrounded by dominating people for a long time.

That was the biggest problem, persuading Dorrie that she could do her part. "It won't work," she kept saying, as I went over the controls with her. "I'm sorry. It isn't that I don't want to help. I do, but I can't. It just won't work."

Well, it would have.

Or at least, I think it would have. In the event, we never got to try the plan out.

Between us, Cochenour and I finally got Dorrie to agree to give it a whirl. We packed up what little salvageable gear we'd put outside. We flew back to the ravine, landed, and began to set up for a dig. But I was feeling poorly-thick, headachy, clumsy-and I suppose Cochenour had his own problems, though I must admit he didn't complain. Between the two of us we managed to catch the casing of the drill in the exit port while we were off-loading it.

And, while I was jockeying it one way from above, Cochenour pulled the other way from beneath ... and the whole hard, heavy thing came right down on top of him.

It didn't kill him. It just gouged his suit and broke his leg and knocked him unconscious, and that took care of any possibility of having him to help me dig Site C.

xi

The first thing I did was to check the drill to make sure it wasn't damaged. It wasn't. The second was to manhandle Cochenour back into the airbody lock.

That took about everything I had, with the combined weight

of our suits and bodies, getting the drill out of the way, and my general physical condition. But I managed it.

Dorrie was great. No hysteria, no foolish questions. We got him out of his heatsuit and looked him over.

The suit leg had been ruptured through eight or ten plies, but there had been enough left to keep the air out, if not all the pressure. He was alive. Unconscious, all right, but breathing. The leg fracture was compounded, with bone showing through the bleeding flesh. He was bleeding, too, from the mouth and nose, and he had vomited inside his helmet.

All in all, he was about the worst-looking hundred-or-whatever-year-old man you'll ever see-live one, anyway. But he didn't seem to have taken enough heat to cook his brain. His heart was still going-well, I mean whoever's heart it had been in the first place was still going. It was a good investment, because it was pumping right along. We put compresses on everything we could find, and most of the bleeding stopped by itself, except from the nasty business on his leg.

For that we needed more expert help. Dorrie called the military reservation for me. She got Amanda Littleknees and was put right through to the base surgeon, Colonel Eve Marcuse. Dr. Marcuse was a friend of my own Quackery fellow; I'd met her once or twice, and she was good about telling me what to do.

At first Colonel Marcuse wanted me to pack up and bring Cochenour right over. I vetoed that. I gave her satisfactory reasons-I wasn't in shape to pilot, and it would be a rough ride for Cochenour. I certainly didn't give her the real reason, namely that I didn't want to get into the reservation and have to explain my way out of it again. So instead she gave me step-by-step instructions on what to do with the casualty.

They were easy enough to follow, and I did all she commanded:

reduced the fracture, packed the gash, stuck Cochenour with broadspectrum antibiotics, closed the wound with surgical Velcro and meat glue, sprayed a bandage all around, and poured on a cast. It

depleted our first-aid supplies pretty thoroughly and took about an hour of our time. Cochenour would have come to while we were doing it, except that I had also given him a sleepy needle.

Then he was stable enough. From then on it was just a matter of taking pulse and respiration and blood-pressure readings to satisfy the surgeon, and promising to get him back to the Spindle pretty soon. When Dr. Marcuse was through, still annoyed with me for not bringing Cochenour in for her to play with-I think she was fascinated by the idea of cutting into a man composed almost entirely of other people's parts-Sergeant Littleknees came back on the circuit.

I could tell what was on her mind. "Uh, honey? How did it happen, exactly?"

"A great big Heechee came exactly up out of the ground and bit him exactly on the leg," I told her. "I know what you're thinking. You've got an evil mind. It was just an accident."

"Of course it was," she said. "I just wanted you to know that I don't blame you a bit." And she signed off.

Dorrie was cleaning the old man off as best she could-pretty profligate with our spare sheets and towels, I thought, considering

that my airbody didn't carry a washing machine aboard. I left her to it while I made myself some coffee, lit another cigarette, and sat and thought up another plan.

By the time Dorrie had done what she could for Cochenour, then cleaned up the worst of the mess, then begun such remaining important tasks as the repair of her eye makeup, I had thought up a dandy.

As the first step, I gave Cochenour a wake-up needle.

Dorrie patted him and talked to him while he got his bearings. She was not a girl who carried a grudge. On the other hand, I did, a little. I wasn't as tender as she. As soon as he seemed coherent I got him up, to try out his muscles-a lot faster than he really wanted to. His expression told me that they all ached. They worked all right, though, and he could stump around on the cast.

He was even able to grin. "Old bones," he said. "I knew I should have gone for another recalciphylaxis. That's what happens when you try to save a buck."

He sat down heavily, wincing, the leg stuck out in front of him. He wrinkled his nose as he smelled himself. "Sorry to have messed up your nice clean airbody," he added.

"It's been messed up worse. You want to finish cleaning yourself up?"

He looked surprised. "Well, I guess I'd better, pretty soon-"

"Do it now. I want to talk to you both."

He didn't argue. He just stuck out his hand, and Dorrie took it. With her help he stumped, half-hopping, toward the clean-up. Actually Dorrie had already done the worst of the job of getting him clean before he woke up, but he splashed a little water on his face and swished some around in his mouth. He was pretty well recovered when he turned around to look at me.

"All right, Walthers, what is it? Do we give up and go back now?"

"No," I said. "We'll do it a different way."

"He can't, Audee!" Dorrie cried. "Look at him. And the con-

dition his suit is in, he couldn't last outside an hour, much less help you dig."

"I know that, so we'll have to change the plan. I'll dig by myself. The two of you will slope off in the airbody."

"Oh, brave heroic man," Cochenour said flatly. "Are you crazy? Who are you kidding? That's a two-man job."

"I did the first one by myself, Cochenour."

"And came into the airbody to cool off every little while. Sure. That's a whole other thing."

I hesitated. "It'll be harder," I admitted. "Not impossible. Lone prospectors have dug out tunnels before, though the problems were a little different. I know it'll be a rough forty-eight hours for me, but we'll have to try it-there isn't any alternative."