Takeoff. Part 19

"He's satisfied with his beer ration, I guess. He isn't much of a drinker. He'd rather swap true confessions with Joe One-Note." He finished his drink and mixed another. "you know ," he said philosophically, "I have done a little computation. a.s.suming that all of Joe's stories are true, and a.s.suming that each of his conquests was completed in a minimum amount of time, and using Service tables to compute the average length of a voyage and the average time of stay on a planet-figuring all these in, I say, I have come up with a cubic equation."

Drake nodded. "I follow you. So?"

"I have come up with two real and one imaginary roots to the equation." He held up a hand and began counting them off on his fingers.

"Real Root One: Captain Dumbrowski is over nine hundred years old. Otherwise, he couldn't possibly have done all that work in the time allowed.

"Real Root Two: Captain Dumbrowski has psionic powers and is able to teleport himself from this s.h.i.+p every night to some suitable planet in the galaxy and get back within eight hours."

"Uh-huh. And the imaginary root?"

"Captain Dumbrowski's stories are imaginary. But, being imaginary, such a root is not allowable in a real situation."

"Naturally not," agreed Drake. "Pour me another drink."

As the navigator mixed, Drake asked: "I wonder why he lays it on so thick?"

"He married young," Devris said oratorically. "His wife is a small, birdlike woman to whom he is intensely devoted. She is, as far as I can determine, a simpering prude."

"So he tells sea stories like Long John Silver, eh?"

From then on, Drake managed to get away from Dumbrowski early and have a chat with Devris in the evening. The navigator proudly displayed his instruments, and even let the doctor compute their position one day. Drake got one of the factors confused, and Devris respectfully informed him that he had better tell the captain to turn around, because the s.h.i.+p was heading towards Alhena in Gemini, dead away from their target.

Drake, in turn, took the navigator to Section Five to show him his ducks.

"Why live ducks, anyway?" Devris asked. "Why not just s.h.i.+p them all as eggs?"

"Well, remember, these aren't going to be domestic ducks; they'll be allowed to go wild on Okeefenokee. One of the most important things a duck can learn is how to be a duck. It isn't all instinct, you know. So we have a live adult duck for every hundred eggs. The old duck teaches the younger ones the duck business."

"Been in the family for generations, eh?" Devris asked.

"We hope so. Believe me, we hope so."

"You hope so? I'd think any duck could learn the duck profession. It ought to be easy as duck soup."

Drake winced. "Not necessarily. These ducks, like most domestic ducks, are descended from the Anas boschas-the mallard. But domestic ducks have been inbred and crossbred for meat and egg qualities. In several strains, the brooding or nest-sitting instinct has been bred right out. Such a species wouldn't survive in the wild; the duck would lay her eggs and then walk off and leave them.

"We went back to the original wild mallard to get Anas okeefenokias, here. The genetic engineers worked hard to get the bird they wanted, but a couple of strains turned out to be absolutely worthless.One strain was a failure because the opposite s.e.xes refused to have anything to do with each other-no mating instinct."

"Tell that to Captain Dumbrowski. He'll have a duck fit," said Devris calmly. He ducked just in time.

Seventeen weeks slipped by. It was on the fourth day of the eighteenth week, two days' flight from Okeefenokee, that Drake found a sick duck.

It wasn't really very ill; it had managed to get a scratch near one eye, and the scratch had become slightly infected. It took him a couple of minutes to snare the duck, then he picked it up and looked at it.

"Not too bad at all," he said. "I'll take it up to my cabin and put something on that. And I guess I'd better take a good look at the others; they may have been fighting."

Devris mopped the perspiration from his dripping brow. "You want me to take it up, doc? I have to go make my positional check, anyway. MacDonald is going to stop the s.h.i.+p in a few minutes."

"Sure. Thanks." Drake handed the duck to the navigator. "Keep her close to your body, and when you get her up to my place, put a blanket around her. These ducks have a higher body temperature than normal, and that air out there is pretty cold to them."

"Can do," said Devris. And he left, with the duck cradled securely in his arm.

Fifteen minutes later, a loud-speaker blared in the room. The dense air, coupled with Dumbrowski's booming voice, made a thunderous noise in the compartment. Squawking, flapping ducks fled from the voice.

"DRAKE! GET UP HERE TO THE CONTROL BLISTER! AND I MEAN FAST!".

Drake made it fast. There must be something badly wrong for Dumbrowski to give an order like that.

The first thing that struck him oddly when he entered the control blister was the peculiar odor. There was the acrid smell of burnt insulation, the biting, metallic effluvium of vaporized copper, the stench of burnt feathers, and-beneath it all-the tasty, tantalizing aroma of roast duck.

Devris was standing at rigid attention in the middle of the room, listening to Dumbrowski bellow.

"...and I don't give a d.a.m.n what the doctor asked you to do!"

"He didn't ask me, captain; I volunteered."

"Shaddup! You had no right to volunteer! He-"

"What about me, captain?" Drake asked.

Dumbrowski whirled. "Oh, there you are! What do you mean, letting one of your blasted ducks out of their Section ? You dumb cluck, do you realize you've wrecked a multi-million dollar s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p?"

MacDonald was kneeling over an open panel from which heavy clouds of smoke were still pouring.

It seemed that MacDonald had been inspecting the circuits, giving them a final check before the last two days of the drive. The ma.s.s-time converters had been shut off so that Devris could make the daily position check.

MacDonald had had the panel open, and had stepped across the room to get a meter of some kind.

And a duck walked in.

MacDonald had tried to shoo it out, but the duck, stubborn to the end, had shooed in the opposite direction. Instead of fleeing through the open door, she had headed for the darkened cabinet which housed the control circuits.

She had landed across a couple of leads which came directly from a high-voltage, high-amperage, direct-current generator. MacDonald had been afraid to try to get her out, and afraid not to. She had flapped and quacked and fluttered about, jiggling loose wires and cracking other equipment. Then the insulation on the DC leads had broken, and all h.e.l.l busted loose.

The unfortunate thing was that the leads had been between the generators and the circuit breakers.

There was no load on them at that point and no reason to think there would be a short. But short there was. The duck had died instantly, and had carbonized an instant later. The arc established had blazed its way back to the generator, destroying everything in its path. Carried by the ionized metal between the leads, the arc had not stopped until it reached the point where the leads were separated by a high-test ceramic insulator.

"And the worst of it," MacDonald said, "is that we can't replace it. We're not equipped to repair a burned out generator and all that other stuff. We don't carry that many spares. Things like this just don't happen on board a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p."

"I'll say they don't!" Dumbrowski bellowed. " And if it hadn't been for this duck doctor here, it wouldn't have happened at all!"

Drake clenched his teeth and said nothing.

"Do you know what this means?" Dumbrowski asked in a subdued roar. "It means we will have to call all the way back to Earth and tell them we're marooned here, two days' time from our destination.

And that means we'll have to sit here and wait for eighteen weeks for the s.h.i.+p to get here with the necessary parts!"

"Couldn't we get a s.h.i.+p here from Okeefenokee?" Drake asked, forcing his voice to keep calm.

Dumbrowski sneered. "Hardly. That's a Cla.s.s C colony; it isn't really a colony yet. It isn't self-supporting. There isn't a s.h.i.+p any closer than Earth."

He stood there for a moment, and evidently his anger subsided a little. " All right; it's happened.

We'll have to make the best of it. We've got enough food on board, and the paragravity units didn't go-thank Heaven."

MacDonald, rummaging around in the smouldering ma.s.s of fused equipment, said: "The only thing gone is the control system of the ma.s.s-time converters and the drive thrust." He scrabbled around a bit more, then: "And all the leads to the cryogenics section."

It took a full two seconds for that to hit Drake. "You mean the refrigerator? The one my eggs are in?"

"Yeah," said MacDonald, his voice m.u.f.fled by the cabinet.

"Five thousand rotten eggs on our hands!" bellowed Dumbrowski. He turned to Drake. "We might as well start dumping them now."

It was all Drake could do to hold his temper. Part of him wanted to throw a punch straight into Durnbrowski's teeth; part of him whispered that it might not be too sensible. Dumbrowski outma.s.sed him by fifteen kilos.

Discretion won by a narrow margin. "I'm afraid I can't let you do that, captain," he said stiffly. "At least not until we check with the Interstellar Commission. They might frown on our dumping those eggs without doing everything in our power to save them."

"Look, Doc," Dumbrowski said coldly, "I've dumped cargo before if it was going to spoil. I once dumped five tons of powdered eggs because a leaky water pipe damped them down. When eggs begin to stink, they really stink. Hydrogen sulfide isn't too congenial an aroma.

"If I ask the Commission, they'll just tell me to dump 'em. So why bother?"

"Now you look, Dumbrowski." Drake's voice was rapidly becoming brittle. "In the first place, those aren't ordinary eggs. They are fertile, mutant duck eggs. In the second place, I am quite sure that the Commission won't tell you to dump five thousand eggs worth two thousand dollars each!"

Dumbrowski's heavy brows shot up. "Two thou-You mean those eggs are worth ten million dollars?"

"Exactly."

"But what else can we do? MacDonald!" He swung around to the engineer, who was still probing in the ruins. "Is there any chance we can get the refrigerator going again?"

"None, skipper. Everything in here is gone."

Dumbrowski turned back to Drake. "See? What else can we do?"

"What do you normally do with fertile eggs?"

"You mean-?"

"I mean we incubate them. Check with the Commission." And Drake turned on his heel andwalked out.

Drake blamed himself for the escape of the duck. He'd forgotten to tell Devris that they were stronger than an average duck because of the high gravity they lived under. Devris had wrapped the duck securely in a blanket and left it on Drake's bed. The door to the doctor's cabin had been left open a crack, and after the duck had wriggled herself loose from the blanket, she had gone out for a stroll.

Well, he had to agree with Dumbrowski on one thing: there was nothing to be done about it now; they'd just have to make the best of it.

He went down to Section Twenty, where the refrigerators were. The egg cases would have to be removed and thawed properly, at just the right rate. Then they'd have to go into the incubator. He figuratively spat on his hands and got to work.

When Lieutenant Devris came down an hour or so later, the eggs were in the slow warmer. Drake looked up as the sound of boots echoed along the corridor and into the room.

"Hi, Pete. What's up?"

Devris grinned lopsidedly. "The captain told me to bring this to you. He's too furious to bring it himself." He handed Drake a flimsy.

Drake looked at it and grinned. It read: "Okeefenokee duck eggs must not be allowed to perish.

Incubate and hatch. Every effort short of actual danger to crew must be expended to save ducks. Crew of the Constanza is instructed to give Dr. Rouen Drake full co-operation."

Devris said: "I'm sorry about that duck, Doc."

"Forget it. It could have happened to anyone. What are the chances that it would walk into the control blister? Pretty small, I'd think."

"Yeah. Pretty small. But it happened."

"I'll say it did. What a mess." He paused and looked up at the navigator. "Pete?"

"Yeah?"

"Pete, why does Dumbrowski have it in for me?"

Devris looked uncomfortable. "I don't know, Doc. It's just his way. He yells at everybody. Don't ask me why he picked you to rib. You can't always explain the queer quirks in a guy's mind." Then he turned and went out.

Drake looked at the door for a long time. Then he shrugged and went on with his work.

The eggs went into the big automatic incubator. Normal duck eggs are incubated at 101 to 103 Fahrenheit for twenty-eight days, but the Okeefenokee duck eggs required 129 F. for only twenty-one days.

Every ten hours, the incubator automatically turned the eggs; the atmosphere inside was kept properly humid and warm. On the sixth day, Drake candled the eggs to see if any were infertile.

Thirty-two of them showed no sign of life; they went into the disposal unit. The others went on incubating.

Dumbrowski calmed down quite a bit during the next couple of weeks. Drake didn't go out of his way to avoid the man, but he didn't seek the captain out, either. The feeling seemed mutual.

Still, Drake dreaded the day when' he would have to tell Dumbrowski the whole truth. He had spent his time getting the exact measurements of the s.h.i.+p-and the s.h.i.+p wasn't quite big enough.

Eighteen weeks until help would come from Earth. Eighteen weeks of floating in emptiness, fifty-four light-years from their destination, thirty-four hundred light-years from Earth, and nine light-years from the nearest star.

The eighteen weeks became seventeen, then sixteen, and then fifteen. And the duck eggs were ready to hatch.

Two days before the hatch was ready, Drake went to Captain Dumbrowski. For over a week, things had looked calm on the surface, but underneath, the situation was about as touchy as dry nitrogeniodide in a sandstorm.