Part 21 (1/2)
The two men looked at each other without smiling. ”You hurt?” Dumbrowski asked levelly.
”Yeah.” Drake pointed at his nose. ”Slightly busted,” he lied. ”You?”
Dumbrowski removed the pad, and blood poured from an inch-long cut directly over his cheekbone. ”I'm bleedin' to death, you butcher.”
Drake walked over and looked at the wound. ”I'll put a tourniquet around your neck.”
”You would.”
Drake took antiseptics and healing agents from his bag and did things with them. Dumbrowski sat stolidly through it all. Finally, the doctor sprayed dermiseal over the cut and pinched it together while the proteinoid plastic polymerized, sealing the edges of the wound.
The eye was badly swollen and purpling. Drake took a hypogun out of his case and fired three minuscule shots into the tissue around the eye and then stood back.
”You'll live,” he said.
”Thanks, Doc.” He turned to MacDonald. ”Mac, go down and get Pete, and you two put that Section Six peegee unit back together. We'll have to work on the main generator coils instead.”
When MacDonald had gone, Dumbrowski got up and walked over to his foot locker, from which he extracted a one-liter bottle of amber fluid. ”I hope you like Irish,” he said. ”It's as good for settling a brawl as it is for starting one.” He poured two and added ice water. Then he said: ”We've got to figure out how we're going to handle these ducks.”
He never mentioned the fight again.
”I really don't think I can stand this much longer,” Devris said. ”I've gone along this far just for the gag, but I have almost reached my limit.”
The heat was oppressive. The air was so wet that it seemed to splash as they slogged through it.
And at one and a half gravities, even the effort to lift a foot was annoying and tiring.
Drake took a scoopful of duckling food from a fifty-kilo drum and dumped it into the feeding troughs near the brooder.
”Wakwakwak!” chortled a hundred little b.a.l.l.s of feathers as they scrambled around the heating unit of the brooder.
Devris poured water into the drinking pans. It ran” abnormally fast and splashed queerly under the extra pseudogravitational acceleration. ”Yes, sir ,” he repeated, ”just about reached my limit.”
”What are you griping about?” Drake asked.
”Oh, nothing, nothing. It's just that for the past two weeks, I have been b.u.mbling around under a gee pull that makes me feel like I was made of lead. I seem to have spent all my life feeding ducklings stuff that acts like bird shot and pouring them drinks that flow like mercury.”
”There's not that much difference,” Drake objected. ”In addition,” the navigator went on, ignoring the interruption, ”I have to lug this grossly heavy corpse of mine around through a fever-swamp atmosphere that is gradually driving me to the verge of acute claustrophobia.” He wiped at his forehead.
”And, as I said, I have just about reached my limit.”
”What are you going to do when you reach it?”
”Take a taxi and go home,” Devris said, with an air of finality.
Drake finished filling the feeder and dusted off his hands.
”That's the last one for today ,” he said. ”Let's go up to your place; I want to look up something in that book of regulations of yours.”
Devris set down his bucket of water. ”How did you know I had a reg book?”
”Simple deduction.”
”He can't even use a word without 'duck' in it,” Devris whispered in a hoa.r.s.e aside. ”O.K.
How?”
”I reasoned that no one would be able to quote from regulations the way you do without having studied them extensively. Whence, it follows that you must own a copy of your own, since it would be inconvenient for you to borrow the captain's all the time-and bad politics, besides.”
”Marvelous, Holmes! Absolutely marvelous! You figured it out with only those few clues?”
”Almost,” Drake admitted modestly. ”Of course, there was one additional bit of evidence.”
”Which was?”
”I saw the book in your room.”
”Holmes, you are phenomenal; let's go.”
The two men plodded their way up the stairs. The entire s.h.i.+p was under one hundred and fifty per cent of a Standard Gee now; the power coils had had to be rebuilt, but it was easier than redoing each floor singly.
They finally pushed their way into Devris' cabin and sat down.
”Whooo!” Devris said. ”At least it's cooler in here.”
MacDonald had rigged up individual air-conditioners for the sleeping rooms, but nothing could be done about increased pressure and gravity. The air was cooler and less humid, that was all.
Drake took the copy of the Interstellar Commission Regulations and began leafing through it.
”What's the trouble?” the navigator asked.
”s.p.a.ce,” Drake said. ”We haven't got enough floor area on the s.h.i.+p to take care of the ducks unless we jettison some of the cargo. This is a pretty big s.h.i.+p, but it's not big enough.”
”Cargo?” Devris put a finger to his chin and stared at the ceiling. ”You want to get rid of non-perishable cargo. Hm-m-m.” He rubbed his chin with the finger. ”Try Section XIX, Paragraph...uh...seven, I think.”
Drake turned to that section and began reading. ”The cargo officer shall be responsible for all damage to the s.h.i.+p due to s.h.i.+fting cargo, since it shall-”
”Nope,” Devris interrupted, ”that's for bigger s.h.i.+ps, with four or five men in the crew. Wrong paragraph. Try Seventeen.”
Drake flipped over several pages. ”If, in case of emergency, it shall become necessary to jettison cargo, such cargo shall be that which is the least-”
”I can boil that down for you,” Devris said. ”There are orders of precedence. The idea is to junk the cheapest, most useless cargo first, and work your way up. Suppose you have a hundred kilos of oxygen and a hundred kilos of diamonds, and you have to get rid of a hundred kilos of something. What do you get rid of?
”Well, if it's s.p.a.ce you need, you get rid of the oxy, because a hundred kilos of diamonds can be broken up and stashed here and there in out-of-the-way places. Even if they couldn't, they'd be kept because they're a bit more expensive than oxy.
”On the other hand, if the s.h.i.+p is low on oxy, you jettison the diamonds. See?”