“They landed here!” shouted Gorbovsky. “The city is there, I know it!”
Something in the control room chimed delicately during the frightful reeling silence, and suddenly Falkenstein roared out in a heavy broken bass:
I would go on, thought Sidorov. Fool, jackass. I should’ve waited for Gorbovsky to decide on a landing. Not enough patience. If he had gone for a landing today, I wouldn’t give a damn about the autolab.
And Falkenstein roared,
“Altitude twenty-one kilometers!” shouted Gorbovsky. “I’m switching over to horizontal.”
Now come the endless minutes of horizontal flight, thought Sidorov. The ghastly minutes of horizontal flight. Minute after minute of jerks and nausea, until they’ve enjoyed their explorations to the full. And I’ll sit here like a blind man, with my stupid smashed machine.
The craft lurched. The blow was very strong, enough to cause a momentary vision blackout. Then Sidorov, gasping for breath, saw Gorbovsky smash his face into the control board, and Falkenstein stretch out his arms, fly over the couch, and slowly, as if in a dream, come to rest on the deck. He remained there, face down. A piece of strap, broken in two places, slid over his back evenly, like an autumn leaf. For a few seconds the craft moved by inertia, and Sidorov, seizing the clasp of his straps, felt that everything was falling. But then his body became heavy once again.
Finally he unfastened the clasp and stood up on legs of cotton. He looked at the instruments. The needle of the altimeter was climbing upward, the yellow zigzags of the monitoring system rushed about in blue hops, leaving behind foggy traces which slowly faded out. The cybernavigator was heading the craft away from Vladislava. Sidorov jumped over Falkenstein and went up to the board. Gorbovsky was lying with his head on the control keys. Sidorov looked back at Falkenstein. He was already sitting up, propping himself up on the deck. His eyes were closed. Then Sidorov carefully lifted up Gorbovsky and laid him on the back of the seat. To hell with the autolab, he thought. He turned off the cybernavigator and rested his fingers on the sticky keys. The Skiff-Aleph began to swing about, and suddenly dropped a hundred yards. Sidorov smiled. He heard Falkenstein wheeze angrily behind him, “Don’t you dare!”
But he didn’t even turn around.
“You’re a good pilot, and you made a good landing. And in my opinion you’re an excellent biologist,” said Gorbovsky. His face was all bandaged. “Excellent. A real go-getter. Isn’t that so, Mark?”
Falkenstein nodded, and, parting his lips, he said, “Undoubtedly. He made a good landing. But he wasn’t the one who raised ship again.”
“You see,” Gorbovsky said with great feeling, “I read your monograph on protozoa—it’s superb. But we have come to the parting of the ways.”
Sidorov swallowed with difficulty and said, “Why?”
Gorbovsky looked at Falkenstein, then at Bader. “He doesn’t understand.”
Falkenstein nodded. He was not looking at Sidorov. Bader also nodded, and looked at Sidorov with a sort of vague pity.
“Well? And?” Sidorov asked defiantly.
“You’re too fond of excitement,” Gorbovsky said softly. “You know, Sturm und Drang, as Director Bader would say.”
“Storm and stress,” Bader translated pompously.
“Precisely,” said Gorbovsky. “Entirely too fond. And we can’t have that. It’s a rotten character trait. It’s deeply ingrained. And you don’t even understand.”
“My lab was smashed,” said Sidorov. “I couldn’t do anything else.”
Gorbovsky sighed and looked at Falkenstein. Falkenstein said with disgust, “Let’s go, Leonid.”
“I couldn’t do anything else,” Sidorov repeated stubbornly.
“You should have done something else. Something quite different,” said Gorbovsky. He turned and started down the corridor.
Sidorov stood in the middle of the corridor and watched the three of them leave, Bader and Falkenstein each supporting Gorbovsky by an arm. Then he looked at his own hand and saw red drops on the fingers. He started for the med section, leaning against the wall because he was swaying from side to side. I wanted to do what was right, he thought. I mean, that was the most important thing, landing. And I brought back the containers of microfauna. I know that’s very valuable. It’s valuable for Gorbovsky too: after all, sooner or later he himself will have to land and carry out a sortie across Vladislava. And the bacteria will kill him if I don’t neutralize them. I did what I had to. On Vladislava, on a planet of a blue star, there is life. Of course I did what I had to. He whispered several times, “I did what I had to.” But he felt that it wasn’t quite so. He had first felt this down there, down below, when they were standing by the spaceship, waist deep in seething petroleum, with geysers on the horizon rising up in enormous columns, and Gorbovsky had asked him, “Well, what do you intend to do now, Mikhail?” and Falkenstein had said something in an unfamiliar language and had climbed back into the spaceship. He had felt it again when the Skiff-Aleph had forced her way off the surface of the fearsome planet for the third time, and once again had flopped down into the oily mud, struck back by a blow of the storm. And he felt it now.
“I wanted to do what was right,” he said indistinctly to Dickson, who was helping him lie down on the examining table.
“What?” said Dickson.
“I had to land,” Sidorov said.
“Lie down,” said Dickson. He muttered, “Primordial enthusiasm…”
Sidorov saw a large white pear-shape coming down from the ceiling. The pear-shape hung quite close, over his very face. Dark spots swam before his eyes, his ears rang, and suddenly Falkenstein started singing in a heavy bass,
“Anybody at all,” Sidorov said stubbornly with closed eyes. “Anyone would go on ahead.”
Dickson stood by, and watched the cybersurgeon’s delicate shining needle enter the mutilated arm. There’s sure enough blood! thought Dickson. Oceans and oceans. Gorbovsky barely got them out of there in time. Another half hour, and the kid would never again be making excuses. Well, Gorbovsky always comes back in time. That’s the way it ought to be. Assaultmen ought to come back, or else they wouldn’t be Assaultmen. And once upon a time, every Assaultman was like Athos here.
12. Deep Search
The cabin was rated for one person, and now it was too crowded. Akiko sat to Kondratev’s right, on the casing of the sonar set. To keep out of the way, she squeezed herself against the wall, bracing her feet against the base of the control panel. Of course she was uncomfortable sitting like that, but the seat in front of the panel was the operator’s station. Belov was uncomfortable too. He was squatting beneath the hatch, from time to time stretching his numbed legs carefully by turns, first the right, then the left. He would stretch out his right leg, kick Akiko in the back, sigh, and in his low-pitched voice apologize in English, “Beg your pardon.” Akiko and Belov were trainees. Oceanographer trainees had to resign themselves to discomfort in the one-man minisubs of the Oceanic Guard.