Alice: The Girl From Earth

Chapter Twenty-Four The End Of The Voyage

After a couple of hours the Third Captain had improved enough for us to be able to take him up to the surface. Afterwards the Captains extracted the Blue Gull from the underground world as well. The concrete slab which had covered the entrance to the pit they left in place.

Now three starships stood around the field where the mirror flowers had been smashed to smithereens. The Pegasus, the Blue Gull, and a service tender from the Venus project which lacked a name and only possessed a long alphanumeric ID string.

“Da,” Alice asked, “Can I go down to the forest?”

“Why?”

“I want to find an intact mirror. There’s no way we can show our faces back on Earth without a new bouquet.”

“Just be careful.” I warned her. “You’re not in your yellow jumpsuit now and the Crockadee won’t mistake you for one of its chicks if you’re in blue.”

While we readied our ships for their return to space I let the Skliss have the freedom of the meadow. The Skliss jumped about heavily on the grass from joy, clicked its hooves high above the ground, fluttered its wings but point-blank refused to fly.

“That must be the happiest cow I’ve ever had the chance to see.” Doctor Verkhovtseff mused. “But keeping a whole herd of them would be rather awkward.”

“They told us from the start they were difficult to herd.” I agreed. “Given that they can fly over deep rivers if there’s forage on the other side.

The fat pirate was still sitting on the ground beside the Pegasus; he had convinced us that he had an old, bad heart that demanded fresh air. No one wanted to argue with him and, let alone hold a conversation, especially after the Third Captain had told how it had been Veselchak U himself who had tortured him in a vain attempt to gain the secret of galaxion.

“Zeleny!” I called. “Would you look after the cow while I feed the other animals; just make certain the Crockadee doesn’t carry her off.”

As I looked up I saw still another starship descending on this planet.

Now, that really was too much! This wasn’t a planet as much as a space port! Where had this one come from?

In the end I came to the conclusion that it was reinforcements for the pirates and desired to raise the alarm, but then I realize the ship was in trouble.

The pilot wasn’t flying straight, but was twisting and turning from side to side oddly, and along his tail stretched some sort of greyish mass which acted as a break and prevented a normal landing.

At my cry everyone came running from the ship and looked up at the new arrival.

“Turn on the transmitter, Zeleny!” Poloskov called.

Zeleny hurried to the Pegasus, hunted through the emergency frequencies and turned the radio on full so that those of us outside the ship could hear.

“Incoming ship!” Zeleny called. “What is going on? Are you in trouble. Reply!”

A very pleasant, very feminine voice answered: “I’m in no trouble worth mentioning, no. So long as I can hold on to this thing little else matters.”

“Now that voice is familiar.” I said. Somewhere I’ve heard it before.”

“When we were lost near the empty planet.” Alice suggested.

“Hold it.” The First Captain cut us off. “I could swear that’s my wife Ella.”

The Captain turned white and rushed into the ship to join Zeleny at the com console. A moment later we heard his voice:

“Ella, is that you? What’s going on?”

“Who’s speaking, please? The woman’s voice asked firmly. “Is that you, Seva? Why aren’t you on Venus? You know how worried I get when you gad about the cosmos.”

The Second Captain laughed.

“She can never get used to the idea that her husband is a space explorer.” He told me. “Even though she herself has circled the Galaxy.”

“That doesn’t matter.” The First Captain said. “Have you forgotten your ship’s in trouble? Do you need assistance. What is that thing you’re hauling?”

“Can’t you see it?” Ella sounded surprised. “It’s a living gas cloud. I’ve only been chasing after it for the last three weeks. I caught it in a force screen net, but now it’s trying to break out and get away. So I have to set down on the first planet that I came to strengthen the net field. Seva, darling, you wouldn’t by any chance have a ship of your own on hand?”

“Of course I do.” The First Captain answered. “And don’t hurry in landing, not while that thing. is fighting you. You might crash.”

“Everything will be all right. Just get up here and we’ll land it together.”

The First Captain hadn’t yet finished his conversation with his wife before the Second Captain was on the ship’s bridge; three minutes later they had the starship into the air where Ella was fighting with the obstreperous living cloud that was known across the space ways as a legend, but which no one had managed to capture alive.

The two ships merged their force fields into a common net and after half an hour the living cloud, tightly grasped by the two ships, lay on the grass not far from us. We all ran over to them. I have to admit that I was the first tor each the scene; after all, I understood what a service Ella had done for biology.

The living nebula was…. well, interesting. In interstellar space once it had expanded to fill several million cubic kilometers the effect must have been overpowering, but here on the grass, confined by the occasionally glittering force scene, it really looked like a thick, grey, pulsing cloud.

The air lock to Ella’s ship slid wide and she ran down the extending steps. Her husband, the First Captain, ran to meet her. He stretched out strong arms and Ella jumped up to meet him. The Captain held her in the air a moment and carefully let her down to the ground.

“You’re not injured?” He asked.

“No.” Ella answered, laughing. “And anyway none of that was really important.

Ella was breathtakingly beautiful and all the men fell in love with her at once. Even the empathicator had become transparent from the feelings that filled it.

“Nothing else matters.” Ella repeated, shaking her long blond hair. “The gas cloud is captured, and now all that remains is to get it to Earth to convince the skeptics that it really does exist.

I kept my silence, in as much as under skeptics she, naturally, would include me. I even remembered our last meeting of sorts at the conference and had ridiculed her for chasing after Science Fiction. There exist in the universe so many real, perfectly natural and ordinary animals the study of which costs time and effort, such as the Dragonette minor, wander bushes, and empathicator, that the very concept of a living gas cloud struck me as a fantasy. And I had said so at the time.

“Where have you been hiding?” Ella exclaimed when she saw the Second Captain. “I haven’t seen you for several years. How are you getting on? Are you still flying?”

“No.” The Second Captain answered, “basically I’ve been sitting in one spot.”

“That’s perfectly fine.” Ella supported him. “You can get an enormous amount of work done sitting in one spot. And whose is this charming little girl.”

“I’m called Alice.” The charming little girl answered.

“Alice. What an unusual name.”

“It’s perfectly ordinary. Alice Selezneva.”

“Wait a moment. Does your father not work in the Moscow Zoo?”

“He does.” Alice answered. She knew nothing about our scientific disagreements.

“That’s great, Alice; when you see your father I’d like you to tell him that living gas clouds are not biological nonsense, they’re not fantasies or fairy tale imaginings as he likes to say, but totally real.”

“You can tell him yourself.” Alice said. “My father is here. There he is.”

No escape was possible for me now; I stepped forward and introduced myself.

“I beg your pardon.” I said. “Rather clearly I must acknowledge my error.”

“This is marvelous.” Ella answered. “Now you can help me study the cloud.”

“With pleasure.”

Then Ella turned toward her husband.

“And how did you happen to be here?”

“The Second got into trouble,” Seva answered briefly, “and we had to get him out of it. And we did, with the help of our new friends.”

“And just what sort of trouble did you get into, Captain?”

“I was held captive by pirates.”

“By pirates. I thought you defeated them long ago.”

“We did, but they came back. You know what happens if you leave one weed in the ground.”

“Well, I really don’t understand it.” Ella threw up her hands. “Who in our day and age ever has to spend four years in jail?”

Ella had come to us from another world, the world we were familiar with but from which we had been gone for the last few days. And, in fact, she should it difficult to believe when we told her about torture, caverns, and treachery. For the nonce no one bothered to argue with her.

“And what have you done with the pirates?” Ella asked.

“One’s in a cage. Two are in the hold. The fattest and worst was just here a moment ago.” The Second Captain answered. “Where has he gotten to?”

The Fat Man had vanished. A moment ago he had been sitting on the grass, laughing timidly. Then he was gone.

We hunted through the surrounding underbrush, looked under and behind every bush; he could not have gotten very far. The Blabberyap bird would have raised an alarm.

“This is a fine mess.” Ella said with reproach. “You can’t keep a lone pirate locked up! Really, what sort of weeding are you doing?”

And then I noticed that the cloud was pushing against the restraining force screen stronger than it had before. I looked closer. There were footprints…

“I know where he is!” Alice shouted. She had run from behind me to the net. “He crawled into the cloud.”

“Are you here, Veselchak U?” Verkhovtseff said, leaning against the cloud.

The cloud started to shake, like a pile of hay where a wandering dog is hiding out.

“Let’s let the cloud go and see.” Seva said cheerfully.

“Not on your life!” Ella objected. “I’d never find another one.”

But the fat man’s nerves could take it no longer and his head popped out of the side of the gas cloud and through the force screen, which was only really strong enough to contain molecules of gas. His eyes were puffy and he was gasping for breath; evidently the composition of the gas in the cloud was unbreathable.

Suddenly the Fat Man cut from the cloud and threw himself running across the field.

“Where are you going?” The Second Captain called after him. “We’ll catch you in the end. If you keep running like that your heart will give out!”

But the Fat Man was not listening. He rushed between the bushes, jumped over pits, stumbled and was back on his feet again waving his arms up and down.

And so the Crockadee, lazily cruising the heights, spotted the Fat Man from above, and darted for him like a vulture fixed on a baby rabbit.

Another second and the Fat Man was waddling on air, and the bird carried him high so quickly that when the Second Captain had puled out his pistol the bird was almost half a kilometer above the ground.

“Don’t shoot.” The First Captain stopped him. “If he falls from that height he’ll be smithereens…”

No sooner had the fatal words been uttered than the fat man managed to twist around in the bird’s claws and strike at his captor with his hands. The bird let go. The fat man fell to earth like a rag doll. He vanished on the other side of the hill.

We were all silent. Then Zeleny said:

“He chose his own punishment. He couldn’t have thought of anything better.”

All of us had to agree with him.

While we had been looking at the sky the gas cloud gad silently oozed its way through the net. It had condensed itself until it had flowed between the energy strands like jam, running every which way, and when we had opened our eyes what we saw was that we stood up to our knees in grey jam.

“Grab it!” Ella shouted. “It’s getting away.

And the mist did get away. It changed phase again and surrounded us with an impenetrable mist, and when the mist dissipated an enormous grey cloud floated over our heads.

“We were planning to leave here anyway.” The second Captain said. “I suggest we make haste.”

We quickly herded the Skliss aboard the Pegasus and took off. The remaining three ships rose to follow right after us, and all of us, forming a net with our ship’s force fields, chased after the living cloud.

We did not catch up with the cloud until past the planet Eyeron, by which time the gas had spread to cover some thousands of cubic kilometers and we spent three days forcing it into a compact enough form to fit into our nets.

In the end we trapped the cloud in a triple net and solidly held it in between two of our ships. In that way we brought it to the Solar system where everyone would be able to admire it in an enclosure built in Archimedes Crater on the Moon, although I, personally, cannot think of anything more boring to look at than a living gas cloud.

Ella had insisted that the gas cloud should be placed in a Zoo on Earth, but the terrestrial climate would have been harmful and, really, who goes to a Zoo to look at a mass of grey gas? You go to a Zoo to look at an empathicator, to get a gift scarf from a Sewing Spider, or to pour lemonade on the roots of a wanderbush, or to figure out which animal in the herd of cows roaming over the pasture is the Skliss.

Our last time together was in the Moonwalker Hotel in Lunar City.

“It’s time to say farewell.” The Second Captain said.

The Captains were sitting in a row on a long divan; they looked nothing at all like their stone monuments on the Three Captain’s Planet. The First Captain was pensive and had difficulty in hiding chagrin; while he had been in the Medusa system they had begin the transfer of Venus to its new orbit, so he had missed the grand moment.

The Third Captain was feeling very poorly; he had a cold which he had contracted in the pirates’ cavern, but when Verkhovtseff brought him medicine the Captain refused.

“This isn’t something that can be cured by terrestrial medicines, let me be hoenst with you. Don’t pay any attention. As soon as I go back into space, everything will be all right. The best hospital is the bridge of a starship.”

Only the Second Captain was in a good mood. He had just handed over the formula for galaxion to a group of physicists from Earth. The physicists had taken up about half the hotel rooms in Luna City and every arriving ship brought their colleagues from different universities and institutes. There were scientists coming from Fyxx and Leonce, and the space docks of Pluto had already begun work on the first ship that would be powered by the new drive.

“You’re laughing all the time.” Ella said to the Second Captain; she hated sitting in one spot and was nervously walking around the room. “I suppose you’re pleased with yourself for creating such a commotion among the physicists?”

“Eminently pleased.” The Second Captain admitted. “I have to admit that I was afraid our people had discovered the formula for galaxion on their own and they no longer needed it. All those years I kept worrying: what if they’ve invented galaxion already on Earth?”

“But you never would have surrendered the formula to the pirates?” I asked.

“No, of course not. You can just imagine the sort of plans they would have had for it in your worst nightmares! I hope, I trust that we will never see such things. In the final analysis, space is no longer as big as it once was. I’m just sorry that you were never able gather as many animals as you wanted, Professor Seleznev. But I’ll try to repay you for your efforts by getting you birds and animals for the zoo from where ever I find myself.”

“Thank you, my friends.” I said, “But I must say don’t be concerned for me. We’ll be going out in the Pegasus next summer. That is, of course, if Poloskov and Zeleny won’t refuse to fly with me.”

“No plans for that.” Poloskov insisted.

“I’m willing.” Zeleny said. “If the circumstances and the stars are right.”

Zeleny was incorrigible, but I knew he’d be coming too. He knew it too, but of course he couldn’t avoid raising his doubts.

“And I’m going too.” Alice noted.

“We’ll see.” I answered. “You have the whole of the next year of school to get through.”

“And where are you planning on going now?” Poloskov asked the Captains.

“I’m off to Pluto/” The Second Captain said. “They’ve building ships with galaxion engines now. I’m hoping to get one of the first.”

“And I am going home first, to Fyxx.” The Third Captain said “I haven’t been home in ages. And then I’m going to build a ship with the new drive as well.”

“And I have to go back to Venus now.” The First Captain said. “Venus is already moving into its new orbit. A few months more and my work will be finished. That’s when I’ll be able to rejoin the others.”

“So you’re all going back to Deep Space?” Alice asked.

“Yes.” The First Captain said.

“Of course.” The Second Captain said.

“Where else?” The Third Captain finished.

“And I had been planning to fly to a living, sentient planet.” Ella declared. “That should have been even more interesting than a living space cloud. But I fear I will have to ask Professor Seleznev to fly there in my place.”

“And why?” I asked. “You after all, are the one who’s the specialist in supernatural animals.”

“I’ll be going with the Captains.”

“But we’re heading for the next Galaxy. That’s a long and difficult flight.”

“Don’t argue with me.” Ella snapped back decisively. “I’ve come to my decision. We’re not going to be separated from each other for so long.”

“But what about the children?” The First Captain asked.

“The children will stay with their grandmother. She doesn’t dance at the Bolshoy Theater every day. She can take them out of Kindergarten on Saturdays and Sundays.”

The First Captain was beginning to look rather embarrassed in front of his friends.

The Second Captain inclined his head as a sign of agreement.

The Third Captain signified the same by raising one of his six arms.

“Don’t forget,” Ella told me, rather clearly having no doubts that she would be able to convince the three men of her plans, “You promised me you’d find the living planet. And I will bring you the most remarkable animal we encounter at Andromeda.”

The Pegasus was the first of the ships to leave the Moon. We were in a hurry because it was best if the animals could be transferred as soon as possible into permanent recreations of their home environments. The Captains and Ella accompanied us to the ship and wished us a pleasant voyage. The Pegasus rose on its thrusters over the airless surface of the Moon and set course for Earth.

I hurried to the cargo bays to see for myself how our animals were feeling. Most of the cages we had brought out from Earth were unused. There really weren’t all that many animals. The cage that had housed the pirate Ratty was empty as well. We had landed him and his two followers on one of the planets where they had caused so much trouble. Presumably they would know how to punish the pirate properly.

I fed the Skliss the last handful of grain. The skliss pressed his side to the bars so I could groom him.

Alice came into the hold. Behind her the wanderbushes seminili verenicei.

“So,” I asked, “what are you going to tell them at school?”

“Do I really have to tell them everything?” Alice shrugged her shoulders. “There’s no way they would believe it all.”

She picked up the mop and started to help me clean the cages.

“Yes,” I agreed. Who would believe it all?.

“You’re not satisfied with the expedition?” Alice asked. “Didn’t we get enough animals?”

“No, word of honor, I’m quite satisfied. We’ve made new friends and what new friends!”

“That’s great!” Alice hugged me. “You know, the Captains promised to take me to the other Galaxy. No, don’t worry, not on their first trip, but later, when I’m grown a little.”

“What can I say,” I said, “except ‘Have a Nice Trip.’“

“Don’t be worried, Papa, we’ll most likely be taking you along too. Biologists are always needed on an expedition.

“Thanks, Alice. You’re a true friend.”

Together the two of us finished cleaning the cages and feeding all the animals so that when we landed on Earth everything would be ship shape.