He nodded. “I think I am.”
“That tissue you had in your lungs might have had something to do with your survival, you know—by overriding the normal panic response to drowning.”
“How do you …?” Tarrant looked in surprise from her to Martine.
“Oh, I had the biologist on the Trilby carry out some tests on it while you were on your way here.” Miss Orchard narrowed her eyes behind a screen of smoke. “On what’s left of it, I should say. Destroying half the specimen in acid was one hell of bloody waste, Theo.”
“That was my idea,” Tarrant said. “I wanted to destroy all of it.”
Martine leaned forward with his head tilted. “What sort of test did you organise?”
“I had Norden put a laboratory animal in a container with a small piece of the tissue.”
“Nice.” Martine nodded his approval. “And what happened?”
Tarrant tried to ignore the crawling sensation in his spine as Miss Orchard described how a white rat had nosed the black jelly, apparently under the impression it was a foodstuff. The tissue had been seen to flow into its mouth, and from that moment the animal’s behaviour patterns had been highly abnormal. It had refused to take part in mazerunning tests, had stopped responding to stimuli, and when deliberately presented with a chance to escape from the laboratory had bolted towards the side of the ship in an attempt to reach the sea. The biologist had recaptured and killed it, and was currently sectioning the lungs to investigate the link-up with the rat’s central nervous system.
“I’ll be interested to hear what he finds,” Miss Orchard concluded, turning back to Tarrant. “What’s the matter with you, young man?”
“If you really want to know about that tissue,” Tarrant said, “try the experiment I suggested to Mr Martine this morning. Try swallowing some of it yourself.”
“So you have got something to say.” Miss Orchard looked pleased. “Do you know, Hal, that I’m Project Leader on the dysteleonics investigation?”
“Nobody told me.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No.”
“I see.” A malicious glint appeared in Miss Orchard’s eyes. “You don’t think I’m too young and pretty for the job?”
“All I’m thinking about is that a friend of mine is going to be killed.”
“I’m sorry.” She looked genuinely apologetic. “Well, here’s the position. Until today the biggest leap forward we managed to achieve on the dysteleonics thing came two years ago when we discovered the water planetoids which Bergmann had postulated. On the strength of that I managed to appropriate a space craft, and I even got funds for an expedition which would have obtained water samples and looked for a matter transceiver.”
“What went wrong?”
“We’ve got all kinds of enemies in the Government—some of them I don’t even know about. They let me keep the ship, but all of a sudden the Air Force decided it couldn’t release any qualified pilots for research work.”
“I’m not a qualified astronaut,” Tarrant said, feeling a touch of coolness on his brow. “I flew three training missions.”
“Three or thirty—it makes no difference.”
Tarrant’s jaw sagged. “Are you serious?”
“I mean that an ion ship isn’t like a first-generation space capsule. You don’t measure your fuel reserves in seconds. Once you’re up there you can fly around to your heart’s content—practise as much as you want.”
“It’s all so simple.” Tarrant wondered if he had made the sarcasm sufficiently obvious. “Why didn’t you get somebody else to do it a couple of years ago? An out-of-work janitor, perhaps, or a. …”
“Don’t go huffy on me, Hal,” Miss Orchard said impatiently. “I’m the one who’s offering you a ship—and a volunteer crew, as well. Of course, I’d want my interests properly looked after when you were up there.”
Tarrant felt a sensation akin to drowning, and he made a damping movement with both hands. “Miss Orchard—what are you talking about?”
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m talking about proving a scientific theory. As far as you’re concerned, I’m talking about saving the lives of your friends.”
“How?”
Miss Orchard looked at him reproachfully. “I should have thought that was obvious—you need to destroy the central mass of the creature you refer to as Ka.”
“I. …” Tarrant had difficulty in speaking. “I didn’t think anybody was going to believe me about that.”
“Most people wouldn’t,” Martine put in. “But we’ve satisfied ourselves that the scrap of tissue we got out of your chest isn’t an autonomous unit. There has to be the equivalent of a biological broadcasting station somewhere.”
“But you accept the principle of telepathy?”
Martine glanced at Miss Orchard, and she nodded. “We believe that dysteleonics transmission and a number of mental phenomena—including so-called telepathy—are manifestations of the same thing,” he said. “I’m prepared to bet that a good dysteleonics detector, if such a thing existed, would show a weak dysteleonics field surrounding that blob of jelly. Surrounding our brains too, for that matter.”
Tarrant tried to weigh the implications of Martine’s words, but Miss Orchard’s earlier statement was in the process of exploding in his mind like a depth charge, sending up fountains of idea-shards. He looked at her in awe.
“Did you say we should destroy Ka?” He fought to keep his voice steady. “You want me to go up there and kill Ka?”
She shook her head. “Let’s try to be a bit more precise, Hal. I want that planetoid investigated at first hand—you want your friends released from an outside control which is endangering their lives.” She paused to light another cigarette from the end of her first. “As a scientist, I would prefer the creature to be kept alive for study by my colleagues. Luckily, though, it won’t be necessary for you to annihilate it completely—breaking up the central mass and reducing its connectivity should be enough for your purposes. As soon as its cohesion is gone the boosters in your friends’ lungs will cease to be boosters, and they’ll be themselves again.
“We’ll have to work out a technique for expelling the tissue, of course. We could always half-drown them, but I think that method has a certain lack of elegance, don’t you? Luckily we have. …”
“Luckily, you say?” Tarrant gave a shaky laugh as he strove to rise up through the spate of words. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”
“On the contrary, Hal,” Martine said soberly. “Miss Orchard is risking her job and a long term in prison. By bringing you here instead of handing you over to the Navy we’ve made ourselves accessories to your nuclear bomb theft. By tomorrow morning we could all be under arrest.”
The telephone on the desk blinked an amber light and Miss Orchard picked it up. She listened for a moment, set the instrument down and stubbed out her cigarette amid the ruins of others.
“Balls to tomorrow morning,” she said brusquely. “There’s an Admiralty plane on the way right now. Make up your mind what you’re going to do, Hal—if you’re going you’ll have to blast off in less than three hours.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the three years since he had last worn a space suit Tarrant had forgotten most of the discomfort and indignity. The breathing mixture it was supplying him smelt strongly of rubber, plastics and cleaning fluids—a choking combination which served as a constant reminder that he was totally at the mercy of his life support system.
There were disconcerting popping and scraping sounds each time he moved his left arm—suggesting that the pressure seals in the elbow were not properly adjusted—and, as always seemed to happen, he had difficulty in connecting his relief tube to the ship’s waste disposal system. In common with the other young pilots, he had often laughed at tales of the gruesome accidents which had befallen men who had been careless in that respect, but as he struggled to tighten slippery rings the old stories, apocryphal or not, no longer seemed funny. By the time he had made himself secure he was sweating profusely.