"Escape From The Crater"

Escape From The Crater

by Carl L. Biemiller

Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

They had placed the cryo in a survival pod for rescue and medical emergency use. Made of transparent weld-glass, it looked like a cocoon. Actually, it was a one-man hospital responsive to both outside manual controls and inside automatic direction instruments. It recorded vital life signs continually and illustrated them with x-ray, infrared, sonic, and electronic sensors. It controlled atmospheres, pressures, and temperatures. It could handle total and continuous blood transfusions and manufactured seriological components to match any patient blood types. Under emergency conditions, preset controls could handle surgical operations, including amputations prior to organ replacements from the body banks of surface ships or base medical centers. It could feed its patients orally or intravenously.

Survival pods were used to cope with in-sea accidents or any other hazards, ranging from radiation-poisoned water to shark attacks. All work boats carried them, and Adam I was no exception.

All wardens were trained as paramedics, and all were thoroughly instructed in the use and operation of survival pods.

The hydronauts were skilled and deft in this phase of their training, but Genright had a real flair for the chores of healing. He had long since set his career goal as being one of the Service’s top-ranked medical chemists.

Right now, as he leaned over the pod like a tall black wand in fluid motion, he was remembering again what the medical psychs had told him about the care and revival of cryos just before he lost contact with the mission headquarters submarine, Polaris. The checklist was long, and success was always a gamble.

“What did you forget?” asked Tuktu.

“Where I put my chewy algin, my kelp gum.”

Kim and Toby Lee swapped glances and shrugged. They had seen those two clown away tension many times.

“Did you lend it to Tube Steak?”

“Why would a no-tooth whale want chewing gum?”

“I don’t know, but he’s your only true friend.”

“I’ll remember soon.”

Genright was remembering what he knew about cryos, and his companions knew it as they searched their own minds for useful knowledge.

The hydronauts were not neuro-surgico-psychs. They were sea wardens, young, anxious, taking a nameless risk because it was, as Kim pointed out, their duty.

The cryo in the pod had to be a disaster creation. He was one of a group—and cryos had never been found in groups of uniformed men and women locked in the glacial wall which lined a part of the tunnel that had led them from sea to lake. Part of that wall, splintered by volcanic earth shock into a floating berg, had contained his body and that of a girl beyond hope of revival. The hydronauts had buried her along the rocky shoreline while many of the Kirl watched curiously.

“I think I put my chewy algin gum in your pocket,” said Genright, making a cautious adjustment on a small control, which regulated the cryo’s blood supply. “I didn‘t have any pockets in my swim trunks, and you were wearing that old zip suit, which was sort of close to my hand when I was tired of chewing.”

“Did you ask me?”

“I took you for granted. You were my best buddy then.”

“You want me to look?”

“Not really. If your pocket is sort of gummed shut, it’s there.”

“Let me ease your mind. My pocket is sort of gummed shut. How’s whozis?”

“Going from electro sleep into a natural slumber. You see the rhythm break of the alpha waves in his mind currents?” Genright pointed to a tiny needle gauge. He bent further over the pod. “And look at that beautiful color,” he said.

Tuktu peered and frowned. “Skin tint seems to be healthy all over. What color?”

“I didn’t say healthy. I said beautiful. I was looking at the back of my black hand.”

“Excuse me.”

“Negative.”

“Something else,” added Genright slowly.

“So?”

“So whozis doesn’t like our heart pump any more. We’ve got an auto-disconnect. See it?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that he’s taken over his own blood circulation.”

“How dare he use our blood that way.”

“It’s his. We gave it to him. You going to be mean for six quarts of salty old water?”

“Yah, it’s more’n water.”

Kim could feel a small, cold tingle at the base of his spine. He felt one of Toby’s hands slide into his. Together, but avoiding Genright’s movements, they gazed at the figure in the pod.

It was as tall as he, and well formed and stoutly muscled. The hair was as blond as his own and the face strong and even-featured. Relaxed as it was, however, it showed a few tiny stress lines. There was definite character in that face, which could only be an imprint of firm will. The sleeper was not young, nor was he old.

“I’d guess somewhere in his early thirties, chronological time,” whispered Toby, her thoughts one with his own.

“Close,” said Kim. “The uniform we took off him carries what looks like a high rank insignia of some sort, and not the kind earned too early in a career.”

Toby’s gaze raked the cryo’s nakedness carefully. “He has a beautiful body. Well fed and well worked, and I’d say over rough land. Those thighs have done some climbing and those shoulders have lifted burdens. Notice how his muscles bunch. They don’t lie flat like a swimmer’s, for instance. But we’ll know more about him soon.”

There was silence in the Adam, a remoteness undisturbed by the distant yapping sounds the swimming Kirl made when they didn’t bother to lower the decibel range of the sound they used in talk with the hydronauts. The light spilling into the hull from the open hatch was brighter than the constant illumination of Adam’s interior, and a cool, fresh tang of lake air scented that brightness. The silence was suddenly a form of communion, a joint, if unconscious, prayer. There was awe among them, and, with it, the small musk of fear.

“Breathing shows alteration,” said Genright, “a bit more paced, and with a rise in body temperature which the pod is matching to avoid any chance of chill.”

“Soon?” Tuktu’s voice was a soft bass note.

Genright turned his head and stared at him.

“You stole my gum.”

Kim only half heard the nonsense. The responsibility for the cryo’s revival and subsequent actions was his, and it would test his judgment and leadership. Genright’s special skills and the instructions he’d received from the medical psychs were vital. And it was true enough that the collective qualities of all the hydronauts would prove the venture a success or a failure. But the responsibility was both his charge and duty. It came with command.

What must it be like, he thought, and not for the first time, to die and know it to the end of that conscious knowing?

What must it be like to awaken in the same body you’d left to find it unchanged, and to know that friends and family had been dust, perhaps for centuries? What did it take to be born again, a stranger among strangers who might be the descendants of your own grandsons, and alone, so alone, in an altered world of alien sciences, customs, and differences outside any previous knowledge? What must it be like to be born again, not as an infant, but an adult, and very nearly certain that the death you knew was better than the life you faced? And what did it take to face that life?

Was this why cryos slipped into the protective shell of madness?

It was certainly what Genright meant about the need to guard the patient against what he termed future shock.

Kim grimaced.

“Take it easy,” said Toby Lee gently, aware of his painful unease.

“Sure,” he muttered, “but I’m wondering about how we explain, protect, help…”

“What happened to use?”

“That too,” said Kim steadily. “But how do we make him know about almost anything? About us? Or the Kirl?”

“Depends upon how much he already knows or can be reminded of. He might know a lot more than we do about sciences lost to us by the old wars, and more about many things than they know in the cities. That’s why there were cryos in the first place, and why we revive them.”

Kim forced a smile. “When he looks at Moses, The Kirl himself, he just might not believe that he has a new cousin.”

“Then, again, he might,” said Toby.

Yes, it was possible that the Kirl would not be completely strange to the cryo, but the more familiar forms of humanity, the hydronauts, might be, thought Kim.

The comparative hush in the Adam was not a peaceful one. It held an air of strain and a mounting, nerve pulling charge of disturbing expectancy. The familiarity of Adam’s working quarters seemed just a trifle out of focus. There were two tiny amber lights on the control and com consoles which merely confirmed housekeeping functions. All was tidy, routinely so, although Genright had left that book of his, the Bible, stuffed with what looked like notes, on a handkerchief sized patch of desk space under a line of sensing gauges. He’d apparently been digging out new names for his Kirl cronies. It was out of place, and, for some reason, probably irritation at his own edginess, it scratched against Kim’s normal, easy tolerance.

He left Toby’s side at the pod and walked to the console and picked it up, removing and squaring up the papers into a neat stack as he did so.

He could hear Genright’s feathery mutter.

“I could increase that breathing rate by adding an eeentsy-weentsy dollop of CO2 to the atmosphere.”

And he could hear Tuktu’s marshmallow soft query.

“Why would you do that?”

“I’m mean.”

“I know.”

“He’s had his eight hours and lots of naps.”

“You look scared. Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“What are you scared of?”

“Missing meals.”

Genright’s hands moved swiftly, surely, and confidently, touching and examining the regulators on the outside of the pod.

Toby choked off a gasp. “Kim, here, please.” Her voice was calm. “You look more like him than any of us,” she said sensibly. “It might be better if he saw you first…”

“Because he’s about to open his eyes right now,” added Tuktu quietly.

Kim reached the pod in two giant strides and looked down.

The cryo’s chest heaved deeply. His eyes opened, and for a flicker of a second they reached for a focus and then steadied, and he frowned as they locked upon Kim’s face. The eyes were a washed blue in color and they chilled into a frosty gray as they swept down the length of Kim’s body. They stared as they met the book in Kim’s hand, which he’d forgotten to replace on his way to the pod.

The gray faded and the blue warmed in color, and faint smile crinkles formed at the corners of his eyes.

The hydronauts followed his gaze. Beneath the glassine protective cover of the book, picked out in long-worn gold letters, its title was easily read to all who knew the common language. “The Holy Bible,” it said.

The cryo smiled more broadly. “Hello,” he said, and the little microphones within the pod tossed the greeting into the Adam. His eyes closed and he slept again.

Tuktu and Genright punched each other in the chest.

“What are you talking about?” asked Toby in a foot stamping tone.

“He didn’t say, ‘Where am I’” they informed her.

“Fap!”

“More to the point, where are we?” asked Kim.

“Well, we need a lot more to go on than a hello,” said Genright, “but I’d say, dress him, feed, him exercise him lightly, and put the pod away maybe tomorrow or the next day at most. You’ll excuse the expression, but he seems usable.”

“Congratulations and our thanks, Gen,” said Kim seriously. “And it will be so logged.”

Genright beamed. He pulled his face straight.

“What are you doing with my book? You never read it,” he said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know I had it,” answered Kim slowly.

The ease was back in the Adam and the hush a happy one. The hydronauts relaxed on whatever they could find; in Tuktu’s case, the deck where he sprawled seeming to over-flow his skin.

“I could use a cup of something nice and hot, if it’s warm and served with a light meal or two,” said Genright.

“Here’s your gum, but it has pocket on it.” Tuktu rolled and tossed a vague pellet at him.

“You wounded it.”

There was a thump on the hull above them and a brief, scrabbling rattle like the sound of pebbles on a roof.

“Company,” said Kim.

“And he didn’t cut his toenails,” added Toby with an unladylike smirk.

A bulk of fur dimmed the light from the hatch, and a voice emerged from a small haystack of grizzled whiskers topped by a pair of sparkling brown eyes, which peered from a cliff-side of bushy brows.

“May I visit, young Forerunners?”

“We are your guests, Kirl,” said Kim. “Welcome.”

“Hello, Mose,” said Genright.

“And to you, young Genright.” The Kirl made a graceful, if short, back-humping leap and joined the group within the Adam. Oddly enough, he seemed to take up more space than the hydronauts as he swung his blunt, gray-grizzled muzzle for a look about the Adam’s work area.

Moses was a large specimen of his people, all of whom were a good two feet longer than the sea otter ancestors, which gave them their basic body design. The guard hairs of his heavy pelt, once only white-tipped on black, were now more white than black. He was aging. And there was a salt-and–pepper hue to his short, stubby tail, that powerful swimming rudder which accounted for maybe one quarter of his overall length. The ‘tween-toes webbing of his hind paws showed a looseness not apparent in the younger Kirl, and the forepaws, smaller than his rear ones, showed claws more yellow than ivory. When needed, the Kirl could roll back the skin sheath covering those paws by muscular control to expose what looked very much like a pair of usable, albeit small, “hands.”

The Kirl leader’s coat, like those of all his followers, was a luxury, loose and thick and densely fibered. It made pelagic life possible and adaptation to almost any climate easy. Unlike most mammals that made the sea a home, the Kirl did not have the thermal protection of a layer of blubber. His insulation came from his coat, from the air trapped within the closely packed fibers of fur in tiny pockets.

The Kirl preened those coats constantly, but not from vanity or pride—for cleanliness. Dirt destroyed insulation. No Kirl would risk freezing in some arctic sea or swelter under a summer sun just to look nice. Being super-clean was a necessity.

“There was something you wished to discuss?” asked Kim. “Moses?” he added tentatively.

“I do not object. You all have names and are accustomed to using them. I am pleased that you include me as a friend with a name.”

The Kirl padded to the survival pod, heaved himself erect with his weight on his tail, and peered.

“And does the Sleeper still sleep unchanged?”

Kim hesitated. “He awakened briefly. His slumber is now the rest of the living. You will have a new guest tomorrow.”

The old Kirl lifted his head and stared at Kim. He pulled back his lips as if concentrating on a hard thought, exposing long, sharp fighting teeth. He wrinkled his muzzle. The dark and liquid gaze was sympathetic and understanding.

“Will he be trouble?”

“We don’t know, sir,” said Kim. “But he could be.”

“Then I shall hold what I came to discuss at this time, although discussion is needed, and tomorrow, or as soon as may be, we shall talk about trouble together, or with your crew if you like, Young Forerunner.”

The Kirl, an awkward walker, moved to the hatch ladder.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye, Moses,” said Genright.

“Good-bye, Genright.” The Kirl paused. “That’s a strange name.” He sprang for the coaming and left.

“Goes with a strange type,” said Tuktu.

“A joker,” said Genright peevishly. “Two jokers.”

Chapter One	Chapter Three	Chapter Four	Chapter Five	Chapter Six
Chapter Seven	Chapter Eight	Chapter Nine	Chapter Ten	Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve	Chapter Thirteen	Chapter Fourteen	Chapter Fifteen

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