Mission of Gravity Read Online Free PDF Page B

second officers, and the ones I talk to most.”
    „I hope you will not feel insulted at this, but I am quite unable to tell one of your people from another. I simply am not familiar enough with your distinguishing characteristics.”
    Barlennan almost laughed.
    „In my case, it is even worse. I am not entirely sure whether I have seen you without artificial covering or not.”
    „Well, that is carrying us a long way from business — we’ve used up a lot of daylight as it is. Mack, I assume you want to get back to the rocket and out where weight means nothing and men are balloons. When you get there, be sure that the receiver-transmitters for each of these four sets are placed close enough together so that one will register on another. I don’t suppose it’s worth the trouble of tying them in electrically, but these folks are going to use them for a while as contact between separate parties, and the sets are on different frequencies. Barl, I’ve left the radios by the air lock. Apparently the sensible program would be for me to put you and the radios on top of the crawler, take Mack over to the rocket, and then drive you and the apparatus over to the Bree.”
    Lackland acted on this suggestion, so obviously the right course, before anyone could answer; and Barlennan almost went mad as a result.
    The man’s armored hand swept out and picked up the tiny body of the Mesklinite. For one soul-shaking instant Barlennan felt and saw himself suspended long feet away from the ground; then he was deposited on the flat top of the tank. His pincers scraped desperately and vainly at the smooth metal to supplement the instinctive grips which his dozens of suckerlike feet had taken on the plates; his eyes glared in undiluted horror at the emptiness around the edge of the roof, only a few body lengths away in every direction. For long seconds — perhaps a full minute — he could not find his voice; and when he did speak, he could no longer be heard. He was too far away from the pickup on the platform for intelligible words to carry — he knew that from earlier experience; and even at this extremity of terror he remembered that the sirenlike howl of agonized fear that he wanted to emit would have been heard with equal clarity by everyone on the Bree, since there was another radio there.
    And the Bree would have had a new captain. Respect for his courage was the only thing that had driven that crew into the storm-breeding regions of the Rim. If that went, he would have no crew and no ship — and, for all practical purpose, no life. A coward was not tolerated on any oceangoing ship in any capacity; and while his homeland was on this same continental mass, the idea of traversing forty thousand miles of coastline on foot was not to be considered.
    These thoughts did not cross his conscious mind in detail, but his instinctive knowledge of the facts effectually silenced him while Lackland picked up the radios and, with McLellan, entered the tank below the Mesklinite. The metal under him quivered slightly as the door was closed, and an instant later the vehicle started to move. As it did so, a peculiar thing happened to its nonhuman passenger.
    The fear might have — perhaps should have — driven him mad. His situation can only be dimly approximated by comparing it with that of a human being hanging by one hand from a window ledge forty stories above a paved street.
    And yet he did not go mad. At least, he did not go mad in the accepted sense; he continued to reason as well as ever, and none of his friends could have detected a change in his personality. For just a little while, perhaps, an Earthman more familiar with Mesklinites than Lackland had yet become might have suspected that the commander was a little drunk; but even that passed.
    And the fear passed with it. Nearly six body lengths above the ground, he found himself crouched almost calmly. He was holding tightly, of course; he even remembered, later, reflecting how lucky it