Read Ebook: Birds Found on the Arctic Slope of Northern Alaska by Bee James W

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Ebook has 307 lines and 35273 words, and 7 pages

CAKEWALK TO GLORYANNA

BY L. J. STECHER, JR.

The job was easy. The profit was enormous. The only trouble was--the cargo had a will of its own!

I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.

Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by more of the ubiquitous swellings.

I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he looked.

He glared at me in silence.

"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to tell me about it?"

He lapsed back into silence after this uncharacteristic admission. I almost felt sorry for him, but just then Beulah came racking across the field with her two-ton infant in tow, to show her off to Hannah. I walled off my pity. He had foisted those two maudlin mastodons off onto me in one of our earlier deals, and if I had somehow been responsible for his present troubles, it was no more than he deserved. I rated winning for once.

"I got them there safely," said Captain Hannah.

"And they are growing all right?" I persisted.

"When I left, marocca was growing like mad," said Captain Hannah.

I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of rhial for myself. "Tell me about it," I suggested.

"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing ourselves to hauling a full load of it?" asked Captain Hannah.

"We couldn't," I protested. "The Myporians gave us a deadline. If we had gone through all of that rigamarole, we would have lost the franchise. Besides, they gave you full written instructions about what to do under all possible circumstances."

"Sure. Written in Myporian. A very difficult language to translate. Especially when you're barricaded in the head."

"Well," he said, "I got into parking orbit around Mypore without any trouble. The plastic film kept the water in the hydroponic tanks without any trouble, even in a no-gravity condition. And by the time I had lined up for Gloryanna and Jumped, I figured, like you said, that the trip would be a cakewalk.

"Do you remember how the plants always keep their leaves facing the sun? They twist on their stems all day, and then they go on twisting them all night, still pointing at the underground sun, so that they're aimed right at sunrise. So the stem looks like a corkscrew?"

I nodded. "Sure. That's why they can't stand an axial tilt. They 'remember' the rate and direction of movement, and keep it up during the night time. So what? We had that problem all figured out."

"Of course, it didn't work."

"For Heaven's sake, why not?"

"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be moving?"

"So what did you do?" I asked, when that had sunk in. "If the stem doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few extra hours of night time before they run down."

"Oh," said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, "it was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room. Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours. The plants liked it fine.

"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.

"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to keep the water in place started to break."

"I'd like to know," I said sincerely.

"Did it work?" I asked eagerly.

"Eventually. Then I stopped to think of what to do with the water. It was full of minerals and manure and such, and I didn't want to introduce it into the ship's tanks."

"But you solved the problem?"

"In a sense," said the captain. "I just emptied the pump back into the air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket."

"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a good deal while you were working with the tanks?"

"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving the lights around?" I asked him. I answered myself at once. "No. There must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet."

"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their habits. And now they were mature.

"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made a tiny, maddening whine as it flew."

"And they bit? That explains your bumps?" I asked sympathetically.

"Oh, no. These things didn't bite, they itched. And they got down inside of everything they could get down inside, and clung. That included my ears and my eyes and my nose.

"I broke out a hand sprayer full of a DDT solution, and sprayed it around me to try to clear the nearby air a little, so that I could have room to think. The midges loved it. But the plants that were in reach died so fast that you could watch their leaves curl up and drop off.

"I couldn't figure whether to turn up the fans and dissipate the cloud--by spreading it all through the ship--or whether to try to block off the other plant room, and save it at least. So I ended up by not doing anything, which was the right thing to do. No more plants died from the DDT.

"So then I did a few experiments, and found that the regular poison spray in the ship's fumigation system worked just fine. It killed the bugs without doing the plants any harm at all. Of course, the fumigation system is designed to work with the fumigator off the ship, because it's poisonous to humans too.

"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after running some remote controls into there, and then started the fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions. It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges--the correct word is carolla--are a necessary part of the life cycle of the marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.

"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late before I started, and for once I was right.

"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking--at least, it was to me.

"And it was unnecessary, too. Because apparently the carolla had already laid their eggs, or whatever it is that they do, before I had fumigated them. After my useless days of agony, a new batch came swarming out. And this time there were a few of a much larger thing with them--something like an enormous moth. The new thing just blundered around aimlessly.

"I lit out for the head again, to keep away from that intolerable whining. This time I took a luxurious shower and got rid of most of the midges that came through the door with me. I felt almost comfortable, in fact, until I resumed my efforts to catch up on my reading.

"The mothlike things--they are called dingleburys--also turn out to provide a necessary enzyme. They are supposed to have the same timing of their life cycle as the carolla. Apparently the shaking up I had given their larvae in moving the tanks and dipping the water up in buckets and all that had inhibited them in completing their cycle the first time around.

"And the reason they had the same life cycle as the carolla was that the adult dinglebury will eat only the adult carolla, and it has to fill itself full to bursting before it will reproduce. If I had the translation done correctly, they were supposed to dart gracefully around, catching carolla on the wing and stuffing themselves happily.

"I had to find out what was wrong with my awkward dingleburys. And that, of course, meant going out into the ship again. But I had to do that anyway, because it was almost 'daylight', and time for me to start shifting the lights again.

"The reason for the dingleburys' problem is fairly obvious. When you set up artificial gravity by spinning a ship, the gravity is fine down near the skin where the plants are. But the gravity potential is very high, and it gets very light up where things fly around, going to zero on the middle line of the ship. And the unfamiliar gravity gradient, together with the Coriolis effect and all, makes the poor dingleburys dizzy, so they can't catch carolla.

"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was capturing her prey by sound alone.

"So I spent the whole day--along with my usual chore of shifting the lights--blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man who is captain of his own ship."

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