The next day the cleaning robots went into the room where we had been and scrubbed, vacuumed, and polished it spotless. I know, because I went there especially to check.
Duncan didn’t bother to go with me. He knew his fix would work. It was the knack.
He did a couple of other small jobs for Danny Shaker, but the big one came four days later.
Shaker appeared early in the morning—the ship kept Erin time—in our living quarters.
“I know some of you are going to hate this,” he said, “but we have to go to free-fall conditions for five or six hours. We have a slight drive imbalance, and it’s costing us time and energy. We’re going to do a partial strip-down and take a look.” He glanced at Duncan. “You’d be welcome.” And then to me, seeing my longing expression, “You, too, Jay, if you want. You said that you’d like to see the drive close up.”
I had, and I did. But I couldn’t go with them at once, because I had promised to help Jim Swift move things out of a spare cabin filled with junk. He had been sharing a place with Walter Hamilton, which was no new experience for either of them, except that now Jim complained that in low gravity his cabin companion snored like a handsaw.
The drive went off while we were in the middle of the move, and working in free-fall slowed us down a lot. Nothing would stay where we put it! It was forty minutes after the drive went off before I started along the column that led aft from the living section through he empty and collapsed cargo hold, and on toward the drive area. On the way I paused to take another look at a cargo beetle, clamped to the column. The controls inside looked so easy. I wondered if one day I might get to fly one.
No use asking Patrick O’Rourke, that was sure. I didn’t know why, but he glared at me from his great height whenever he saw me, as though I was some sort of ship’s vermin scuttling along at his feet. But maybe Danny Shaker or Tom Toole would let me fly.
The rear compartment when I came to it was dark and gloomy. It was frightening, even filled with good air and with the drive off. I knew what monstrous energies were generated here. The feel of those energies was somehow still present, lingering on like an odd taste in my mouth.
I thought for a moment that the others were right there, in the first aft compartment that I came to. Then there was a moment of horror, when the four shapes I had seen in the dim light turned into four headless, legless corpses. The working men had taken their jackets off, and the blue clothing hung suspended in the middle of the compartment. Something (I learned later that it was static electricity) had made the chest and sleeves billow out full, as though there were torsos and arms inside them.
I took a deep breath, told myself that I was an idiot, and moved on to the main drive compartment.
Of course, the work of dismantling and inspecting the suspect drive unit had not waited for me. The housing had been swung free, and Uncle Duncan and Danny Shaker, together with two general crewmen, Joseph Munroe and Robert Doonan, were inside it, peering along the huge conical channel. Their legs all stuck out in different directions. I shivered again, because if the drive went on their heads would be vaporized in a microsecond. But it didn’t seem to worry them in the least.
“I’ll bet it’s that.” Uncle Duncan’s voice sounded strange, echoing off the hard vault of the drive chamber. “Is it easy to take apart?”
“No problem.” That was Danny Shaker. “Once I can get my hands on the right tools.”
An arm came groping in the air, toward a length of rough cloth in which wrenches were secured every few inches.
“I’m here,” I said. “I can get it for you. Which one do you want?”
“Give me the whole thing. We may have to try a few.” Danny Shaker’s right hand was still groping about behind him. I reached out to give him the set of wrenches, and saw that his shirt sleeve had somehow been snagged on the edge of the drive opening.
The sleeve was pulled up, to reveal his bare upper arm. I saw, with a horror that made anything earlier seem like nothing, the vivid red line of a scar across his biceps, midway between elbow and shoulder. As I placed the tools in his hand I moved my head to get a view of the underside of his arm. How far did the scar extend?
All the way—all the way around his arm!
I was in the drive chamber for another two hours, while Duncan and the crew made their repairs to the drive. I have to take Duncan’s word to Doctor Eileen that that’s what they were doing, because I took no notice of their actions. My mind was far away, back in the front room of the house with Paddy Enderton, while he raved about Dan, the armless half of the two-half-man. The bad one, the one much worse than brother Stan.
When they were all done with their work on the drive and came back to put their jackets on, Danny Shaker laid a friendly arm around my shoulders. “Hats off to Duncan West, Jay,” he said. And then, to Duncan, “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
I’m sure I cringed at his touch, but Shaker didn’t notice, because at that moment Joseph Munroe gave a snort of disapproval and disagreement.
Shaker turned to him. “Don’t give me that,Joe. I’ve been asking about that drive segment for the past two trips, and you’ve never had the ghost of an idea how to fix it.”
His voice was mild, but Munroe went completely still. “You’re right, Chief,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”
He added nothing more, but I suspected that at least one crew member didn’t approve of Uncle Duncan’s temporary addition to their number. As for me, I didn’t want to listen to praise of Duncan, or discussion of the balancing problem and Duncan’s fix-it solution, or anything else. All I wanted was to get back to Doctor Eileen.
“You remember what I asked you,” I said, as soon as I had a chance to get her alone. “About growing back a man’s arms if he lost them?”
“I told you. It’s impossible. If we still had the limbs, we could re-attach them, but that’s all.”
“I know. But suppose you had someone else’s arms. Could you attach them?”
“We could try. But it would be quite pointless. The muscles wouldn’t match, the nerves wouldn’t match, the bone sizes would be wrong. Worse than that, though, there would be tissue rejection.”
“What’s that?”
“Your body has a set of biological defenses built into it, what’s called your immune system. If something comes in from outside, bacteria, or foreign tissue, your body’s immune system develops a reaction to that. It does its level best to destroy it, to swallow it up and get rid of it. That includes rejection of tissue or organs from somebody else. We can control the rejection with drugs, but it’s very tricky. It only works if the donor—the person the tissue comes from—is very similar to the person receiving it. Even then, you usually get problems.”
“What do you mean, very similar? The same age, or the same size?”
“Jay, what is all this? Age and size don’t have much to do with it. It’s much more important to be genetically similar—a mother, or a father, as the tissue donor.”
“Or a brother?”
“Sure, a brother would be good. Best of all, of course, would be an identical twin. Then there’s absolutely no chance of tissue rejection, because genetically speaking the two are identical. Jay, what is the point of this?”
I told her then, the whole thing. “And I thought,” I said at last, “that maybe Danny Shaker killed his twin brother, so that he could steal Stan’s arms and have them attached to his own body, to replace the ones that he lost.”
Even as I was saying it, it sounded ridiculous. Doctor Eileen just stared at me.
“Did you see scars on both arms?”