John Racham Read Online Free PDF

to guess what it was, they would
automatically assume that the ship and contents were lost. With varying
emotions, depending on who was doing the feeling, they would write off one
staff ship, one unloved admiral, one lieutenant, and one recently promoted
technical sergeant All dead.
    As
for a search party, well, Evans obviously had no idea at all just what that
atmosphere out there was like. Completely enclosed in a suit, a man could
endure for as long as his lung-pack would hold him. Four hours. Two hours out
and two back. And if you got more than a mile away from the Dome in that time,
you were doing extremely well. Query sagged in his seat, wondering at the
primitive survival instinct that had driven him to pull the emergency switch.
How frail the barrier was between intellect and the push of animal instinctl Sitting like this, passably calm, he could
contemplate death with indifference, although it might have been faster, more
merciful if he had kept still before. But should another explosive moment
come, he mused, he would probably do something like that all over again. Flesh
and blood, glands and guts, they ruled in the crunch.
    "Don't
we have any outside sensors at all?" Evans growled, stirring Query out of
his reverie. "Strikes me we ought to have something on battery power. Air-conditioning,
if nothing else. It's like a furnace in here!"
    It was hot. Query felt the sweat trickling down his face and chest. But the
mention of battery power stirred something else in his mind.
    "My
instruments are all dead, sir." Lieutenant Evans was turned away still,
leaning over her panel. She craned her head around now. "Sergeant, would
you know if there's any way of switching to emergency power?"
    "Might be." Query rose , his suit sticking to him, and went
to lean over her shoulder, noticing that she had undone her front again, that
the white globes of her breasts were sheeny with
sweat. More primitive instincts, he thought, as he reached past her and moved a
switch or two, pushing her hand aside. "Three position switches," he
murmured.
    26
    "That
has to mean something. That's power. That's off. So . . ." and he twisted
the switch backward, to hear it click, to see a needle lift and shiver.
"That seems to be it. . ."
    The
control room lurched suddenly, throwing him against her so that he had to grab
to keep his balance. And to let go again, hurriedly.
    "Atmospheric
turbulence," he muttered. "You have an airspeed reading now. And outside temperature. Nothing on
direction. No, that's dead. No lift or thrust readings, either. But the
proximity gauges work, see?"
    "Thank
you." She tilted her head back to smile at him, and she was very close,
very inviting, so that he had a wild urge to touch her . . . and her eyes were
suddenly fathomless brown wells under the transparent plastic of her
spectacles. Then the control room bucked and lurched and swung, and the moment
passed. He staggered back to his seat and fell into it.
    "So
far as I can read them," she sounded unsteady,
"the outside temperatures are crazy, in the nineties. Must
be friction. Guessing between airspeed and the proximity gauges, we seem
to be falling at about eighteen/twenty miles per hour, with about a mile to go
. . ."
    The
derelict bounced again and spun crazily. Query hung on, saw her shove back from her panel with blood suddenly streaming from her nose.
Pain and suffering, he thought, and abundant beauty . . . and all for nothing.
He saw her grope in an upper pocket of the tunic top that gaped free to get out
a tissue and dab at her nose. So futile and purposeless. What a way to die! He recalled his earlier promise—it seemed a lifetime away
now— I'll be back. That strange humanlike
creature, out there in the jungle. He would never know, now. And that was the real loss. Not death, but
the end of knowing. So many things he had never done or seen or known; whole
areas of life left untouched. He wondered if she felt anything like that? She looked to be about his age,