Our door opened as Gretchen reached it and I heard another familiar voice sing out, "Bojemoi! He's hurt." Then I was face up on my own bed and Xia was working on me.
"I'm not hurt," I told her. "Just shaken up."
"Yeah, sure. Hold still while I get your trousers off. Does one of you gentlemen have a knife?"
I was about to tell her not to cut my new trousers, when I heard a shot. It was my bride, crouching inside the open doorway and peering cautiously out to the left, her head close to the floor. She fired again, scooted back inside, closed and locked the door.
She glanced around and snapped, "Move Richard into the 'fresher. Pile the bed and everything else against the outer door;
they'll be shooting or breaking it down or both." She sat down on the floor with her back toward me and paid no attention to anyone. But everyone jumped to carry out her orders.
"Everyone" included Gretchen, Xia, Choy-Mu, Father Schultz, and Reb Ezra. I did not have time to be astonished, especially as Xia with Gretchen's help moved me into the refresher, put me on the floor, and resumed taking my pants off. What did astonish me was to find that my good leg, the one with a meat-and-bone foot on it, was bleeding heavily. I noticed it first from seeing that Gretchen had big blood stains on the left shoulder of her white coverall. Then I saw where the blood was coming from, whereupon that leg started to hurt.
I don't like blood, especially mine. So I turned my face away and looked out the 'fresher door. Hazel was still sitting on the floor and had taken something out of her handbag that seemed to be bigger than the handbag. She was talking into it:
'Tee Aitch Queue! Major Lipschitz calling Tee Aitch Queue! Answer roe. God damn it! Wake up! Mayday, may day! Hey, Rube!"
XX
"If anyone doubts my veracity, I can only say that I pity his lack of faith."
BARON MUNCHAUSEN 1737-1794
Xia added, "Gretchen, hand me a clean towel. We'll make do just with a pressure pack until later."
"Ouch!"
"Sorry, Richard."
"Mayday, Mayday! Hail, Mary, I'm up the crick without a paddle! Answer me!"
"We read you. Major Lipschitz. Report local fix, planet, system, and universe." It was a machine voice with a typical uninflected brassiness that sets my teeth on edge.
"Now let's tape it tightly."
"Hell with procedures! I need T-shift pickup and I need it now! Check my assignment and slam it! Switch point: 'One small step' by Armstrong. Local fix: Hotel Raffles, room L. Time tick, now!"
I went on looking out the 'fresher door to avoid watching the unpleasant things Xia and Gretchen were doing to me. I could hear shouts and people running; something crashed against the corridor door. Then in the rock wall on my right a new door dilated.
I say "door" for lack of a precise word. What I saw was a circular locus of silver gray, floor to ceiling, and more. Inside this locus was an ordinary door for a vehicle. What sort of vehicle I could not tell; its door was all I could see.
It swung open; someone inside called out, "Grandma!" as the corridor door crashed in and a man fell into the room. Hazel shot him. A second man was right behind him; she shot him, too.
I reached for my cane-beyond Xia, damn it! "Hand me my cane! Hurry!"
"Now, now! You lie back down."
"Give it to me!" Hazel had one round left, or maybe none. Either way, it was time I backed her up.
I heard more shots. With bitter certainty that nothing was left but to avenge her, I made a long arm, got my stick, and turned.
No more fighting- Those last shots had been fired by Rabbi Ezra. (Why was I surprised that a wheelchair cripple chose to go armed?) Hazel was shouting, "Everybody get aboard! Move it!"
And we did. I was confused again, as an endless crowd of young people, male and female and all of them redheaded, poured out of that vehicle and carried out Hazel's orders. Two of them carried Reb Ezra inside while a third folded his wheel-chair flat and handed it in to a fourth. Choy-Mu and Gretchen were hustled in, followed by Father Schultz. Xia was shoved after them when she tried to insist on handling me. Then two redheads, a man and a woman, carried me in; my blood-stained pants were chucked after me. I clung to my cane.
I saw only a little of the vehicle. Its door opened into a four-place pilot-and-passenger compartment of what might be a spaceplane. Or might not be; the controls were strange and I was in no position to judge how it worked. I was lugged between seats and shoved through a door behind them into a cargo space and wound up on top of the Rabbi's folded wheel-chair.
Was I going to be treated as cargo? No, I lay there only briefly, then was turned ninety degrees and passed through a larger door, turned another ninety degrees and placed on a floor.
And glad to stay there!
For the first time in years I was experiencing earth-normal weight.
Correction: I had felt a few moments of it yesterday in the ballistic tube, a few more in that U-Pushit clunker. Budget Jets Seventeen, and about an hour of it in Old MacDonald's Farm four days earlier. But this time sudden heaviness caught me by surprise and did not go away. I had lost blood and found it hard to breathe and was dizzy again.
I was feeling sorry for myself when I saw Gretchen's face;
she looked both scared and wretchedly ill. Xia was saying, "Get your head down, dear. Lie down by Richard; that's best. Richard, can you scrunch over a little? I would like to lie down, too; I don't feel well."
So I found myself with a cuddlesome wench on each side of me and I didn't feel a dum bit like cuddling. I'm supposed to be trained to fight in accelerations up to two full gravities, twelve times that of Luna. But that was years ago and I'd had over five years of soft, sedentary living at low gravity.
It seems certain that Xia and Gretchen were just as uninterested in bundling.
My beloved arrived carrying our miniature maple. She placed it on a stand, blew me a kiss, and started sprinkling it. "Xia, let me draw a lukewarm tub for you two born Loonies; you both can get into it."
Hazel's words caused me to look around. We were in a "bathroom." Not a refresher appropriate to a four-seater spaceplane, nothing at all like ours in the Raffles; this room was an antique. Have you ever seen wallpaper decorated with fairies and gnomes? Indeed, have you ever seen wallpaper? How about a giant iron tub on claw feet? Or a water closet with a wooden lid and an overhead tank? The whole room was straight out of a museum of cultural anthropology ... yet everything was bright and new and shiny.
I wondered just how much blood I had lost.
"Thanks, Gwen, but I don't think I need it. Gretchen, do you want to float in water?"
"I don't want to move!"
"It won't be long," Hazel assured them. "Gay shifted twice to avoid shrapnel, or we would be down now. Richard, how are you feeling?"
"I'll make it." "0f course you will, darling. I feel the weight myself from a year in Golden Rule. But not much as I exercised at one gee every day. Dear one, how badly are you wounded?" "I don't know."
"Xia?" "Lots of bleeding and some muscle damage. Twenty or twenty-five centimeters and fairly deep. I don't think bone was hit. We put a tight pressure pack on it. If this ship is equipped for it, I want to do a better job and give him a broad-spectrum shot, too."