Zone Yellow

Chapter 9

Somewhere a few light-years away, someone was yelling at me: “Colonel! Breathe! Please, take a deep breath!” I felt the pressure on my chest: the weight of a deep stratum of rock under which I lay buried. I relaxed a little, or tried to, and felt air whoosh! out of me. That reminded me of something. “Out,” I decided. The outside air pressure was low. I had taken a lungful of near vacuum and fallen over. Now Helm’s got me back inside, and is trying to talk me into breathing in. I thought about it. Hard work. To Hell with it. Time to sleep. I felt better, having let myself off the hook so nicely. Then the sediments built up another two hundred feet deep and I could feel my ribs creaking, getting ready to snap. That kind of worried me, so I took a deep breath and yelled, “All right! Lay off!” I started to sit up, but I’d forgotten those layers of limestone, basalt, and clay holding me down. Then there was an earthquake: the deep strata broke and thrust up and I felt my bones breaking now, but what did that matter? They were only petrified fossils buried in black muck. So I let that go, and wondered how a fellow could breathe under all that solid rock. Helm was bending over me, with his mouth hanging open, and it was his hard hands on my rib cage that were crushing me. I tried to take a swing at him, and found I had no arms, no legs, no body, just the awareness of pain and a desperate need to tell somebody.

“Easy,” I heard somebody say. I wondered who it was, and gradually realized it was me. I got in a little more air and tried again:

“You’re crushing my chest, Andy,” I complained. I sounded like “Urriggaba…”

“Try to relax, sir.” He withdrew a few inches. His face looked worried, poor lad. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, sounding like a fellow who was sorry. I wondered what about.

“It’s been about a week since―after you…”

“Died,” I supplied.

That remark made me suddenly aware of a thousand knives stabbing my chest, especially when I inhaled, which I did, just to check. That brought on a cough, which drove all the daggers an inch deeper.

“Sorry about that,” I told him, or tried to. What I got was more coughing until I blanked out again. Then I was trying to curse and cough at the same time, which didn’t work out well. I was furious with myself, first for being weak as American beer, and second for not being able to handle it. After a while I was sitting up and my arm was supporting me, with no aid from Helm.

Smovia’s face hove into view. My ribs hurt, but not as much, and the doc said, “There, you’re feeling better now. I taped your ribs. Breathing better, too. I think you could take nourishment now.”

“How about a small horse, shoes and all?” I suggested and didn’t even cough.

“Ja, da, for all del,” Helm spoke up, which the translator rendered as “Uh, well, OK.” Not much in that, but then the lieutenant was never a very verbal sort of fellow. I knew he meant, “Gosh, sir, glad to see you’re feeling better.

“I tried to stop the doc, here,” he added in English, “but I guess he was right; you started breathing a lot easier once he taped you up. It looked too tight, but―”

“You did fine, Andy,” I told him. “Just what the hell happened?” I was curious to know. “All I remember is opening up, and―zap.”

“It’s the air pressure, sir,” he told me. “Seems on the phase of the Cosmic All, ah, in this A-line, sir…”

“Go on,” I prompted.

“Lots of argon, Colonel,” he blurted. “We’re way off-course, I’m afraid. C.H. date over four billion years. Atmosphere still forming. The planet ran into a gas-cloud, it appears, mostly argon. Breathable, but low pressure. It damn near collapsed your lungs, sir. Lots of blood there, for a while, and the doc here was carping about how foolish you’d been, but…”

Smovia was back. There was some more painful prodding and poking and I took a few deep breaths for the nice doctor-man, and started thinking about how much time was passing while I lay around repenting at leisure. I was draped in my command chair. On the screens I could see an expanse of mud flat.

“Helm,” I called, weakly. He was right behind me. He came around, still looking anxious.

“How long did you say I was out?” I asked him. I tried to sit up and fell back with a flump! that made my head ring, even though it had impacted on a cushion.

“One week, sir,” he told me grimly.

“Is the shuttle OK?” I asked Helm.

He nodded, still looking grim. “Mired in mud, but undamaged, as far as I could determine.”

“Things here seem too normal,” I remarked. In an entropic vacuole they were supposed to be different.

Helm edged close to me, arranging various expressions on his face. “There’s one thing, Colonel,” he told me like a fellow who hated to be the bearer of bad tidings. I waited for the punch line. It was a doozie.

“We’ve actually been here over a year,” he said quietly, as if hoping not to overhear it. “The sun hasn’t moved; it’s the same day, but the chronometer in the shuttle is still running, and the calendar, too. One year, last week. This is the third time you’ve come to. You’ll faint again in a few minutes.”

“It hasn’t been more than a couple of hours, subjective,” I grumped. “The instruments must be wrong. We can’t afford to be that long!”

“I know, sir,” the lieutenant agreed mournfully.

This time I got an elbow under me. I waited while the little bright lights gradually faded, then got my feet onto the floor. “Where’d Swft go?” I asked. Helm just looked confused, like I felt.

“I need my boots,” I said. Helm helped get them on my feet, which I then planted on the floor. I was sitting on the edge of the command chair now, and I leaned forward until my weight was taken by my feet, and stood up. I didn’t try to push with my legs, just imagined a skyhook lifting my butt, and then I was standing up. I felt a little dizzy for a moment, but that was just the sudden change in the altitude of my brain. The “oh boy, I’m going to faint” feeling passed and I tried a step; it worked OK. Helm was staring me in the face. “For a second, sir, your face looked greenish. It’s all right now. But you’d better sit down and not overdo it this time.”

I agreed wholeheartedly and sat on the edge of the chair.

“Nourishment,” I said. “Rare roast beef and plenty of it, mashed potatoes and gravy, a slab of berry pie. A tall, cold, Tre Kronor beer.”

“Sir, we have the issue rations,” Helm reminded me.

“Recon Eggs Retief,” I specified. “If we’ve been here a year,” I said, doubting it, “why haven’t we starved?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Helm admitted. “In fact, I don’t really know much more than you do, sir, and you’ve been in a coma most of the time.” He looked apologetic―apparently because he had suggested that maybe I didn’t know everything.

“Maybe,” he offered timidly, “we don’t need nourishment in a null-time vacuole, or whatever you called it. Maybe our metabolism stops.”

I shook my head. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t be moving, and breathing, and discussing the matter. Let’s just settle for not understanding it, like most people don’t understand the Net, or like nobody understood the sun and moon until very recently. As a species, we got by in ignorance for the greater part of a million years. We used fire, even though we didn’t know about ‘oxidation.’ ” I realized I was trying to convince myself, and not succeeding. I thought about telling Helm to “carry on” and get out of here. It was just a passing thought, not something I really considered. Then I had another thought:

“Where’s Smovia?”

“Sleeping, sir,” Helm reported. “He’s been sleeping a lot. I think he took something. He offered me one, but…”

“But you’re not ready to become a hophead just yet,” I supplied. “Good man, Andy.” Then I started to say something encouraging, but that felt too phoney. So instead I pointed out that we were stranded in a rather inhospitable section of the Cosmic All.

“Right, sir,” Andy replied briskly. Being content to not understand was a more comfortable intellectual position than eternally wondering. “But we still have the shuttle, sir,” the boy reminded me brightly, as if that solved all our problems. “Intact,” he added.

“I hate to tell you, Andy,” I said hating to tell him, “but there are circuits in this machine that are chronodegradable. Security measure, you know, to prevent accidental use of a shuttle that might be abandoned in a line without A-technology. Also, environmental considerations made it seem like a good idea when we were designing it.”

“But, Colonel, I thought…” Hehn realized there was nothing to say and trailed off.

I nodded. “I’ll get off a VR to the Director of Technology as soon as possible,” I remarked sarcastically.

He jumped on that fast: “Good idea, sir. That’ll…” He faded off. The comforting structure of established procedures didn’t last long.

“Meanwhile,” I said, “we at least have shelter. Minimal luxury, but better than sleeping in the mud.”

“J a, da, for all del,” he agreed, and looked at me anxiously. “We can’t breathe the air out there, sir,” he told me, a fact I’d discovered the hard way. “But there’s enough oxygen in it to sustain us, after the filters concentrate it for us. But that means we’re stuck inside here.”

“So it does, my boy,” I agreed airily. “Was there someplace out there you wanted to go?” I indicated the view through the small window: a glistening, fog-shrouded expanse of mud, dotted with puddles.

“It’s not that, sir,” he explained. “I just thought―well, we need exercise, and maybe, just over the horizon…”

“The planetary crust has just about stabilized, I’d say,” was my next contribution. “The era of intense meteorite bombardment and constant volcanic eruption has apparently passed. The continents are stabilizing, and the water is in the process of accumulating in the sea basins. There won’t be any land life, maybe no life at all. Distilled water and chemicals leached from the higher ground by the water flowing downslope. Probably just a few large lakes, so far; the land is so flat, the runoff doesn’t channel to form a river. Instead of land and sea, there’s just an endless mud flat. No icecaps yet. Not much variety in this world, I’m afraid.”

“And yet this is contemporary with the twentieth century?” Helm queried.

“It’s what the Zero-zero line would be like if a whole series of unlikely events hadn’t occurred,” I told him, “to create precisely the conditions required for the development of life.”

“But, sir, how did primitive life affect things like ice ages and volcanism and all?” was his next anxious question, as if convincing me there was no such place would get us out of it.

“Consider,” I suggested. “After the distilled-water seas were polluted by minerals from the land, plant life appeared. The first plant life, the algae, broke down the abundant carbon dioxide to release O-two into the atmosphere: the second great pollution, of the air this time, that made animal life possible. Animals like coral, for example, made reefs that affect oceanic currents. Then the accumulative plant debris gave rise to the coal beds, and of course the animals’ exhalation of carbon dioxide, along with that produced by decaying plants, provided the greenhouse effect, which had a profound effect on climate, rainfall, erosion, and so on.” I realized I was sounding like a high school science teacher holding forth, so I shut up. Helm didn’t pursue the point, which was OK with me, because I was about out of glib explanations, anyway.