Part 2

I returned to Control and gave the crew a quick rundown on the situation. Work parties were made up and the wreckage cleared away. The dead--the ones we could find--were wrapped in celoflex and consigned to space. I mumbled a prayer over them as they slipped out into the void. They weren't all Christians, but somehow I had a feeling that they wouldn't mind too much. There's something about the immensity of the cosmos that makes men relinquish their petty prejudices. And when I got back into Control and watched the tell-tales on the Geiger-Muller Counters down in the tuberoom, I said another prayer--for Bat Kendo.

I kept wondering why we had hit that meteor swarm. The normal chances of such an encounter are in the vicinity of a thousand to one. Bits of memory kept tugging at me, but I couldn't get things properly trimmed up until a call from Bat in the tuberoom furnished the key.

"Morley, there's a piece of those damned rocks down here ... and it's melting!"

Ice! Water! Weather-plant! The pieces of the puzzle began to fit now. The swarm was ice ... superhard ice ... tempered by the awful cold of the void. And the weather-plant in the hold--one hundred tons of it--had attracted it hungrily! The plant had more than just an affinity for water! It acted like a magnet! There had probably been nitrogen dissolved in the water, too, and that had added to the plant's attraction!

A sick feeling moved into the pit of my stomach and stayed right there. There was no way of jettisoning the cargo, and there wasn't enough fuel for a try at airless Luna! That meant....

I could hear the Venusian botanist's words echo mockingly in my ears. "... we suspect it can create its own weather!"

I knew real fear then. I looked at the great greenish globe of Earth that grew hourly larger beneath us, and shuddered....

* * * * *

Seventeen hours later we were into the ionosphere. My instruments warned that I had just enough thorium left in the pile to keep the _Eagle_ up for another hour and ten minutes. The radar was gone, but the weather-plant was fat and healthy.

I tried to pick up a good spot for the landing. The Mojave Desert. Chances for clear weather were better there than anywhere else, though I could guess even then what our chances were.

The _Eagle_ shuddered to a vibrating halt, balancing on her tail-flare at about twenty five miles. The gyros were climbing the sonic scale, sending their shrieking whine through every deck of the crippled ship. I looked outside, and cold sweat beaded my face. Even at this height, a fine mist was forming around the _Eagle_.

Freed of Venus' formaldehyde atmosphere, our tons of weather-plant were happily doing their job. Drawing water vapor out of Earth's air. It liked fog. _And it could make its own weather!_

I looked at the chronometer. I had just one hour now to get this ship down through this soup that clung to us--without UVR. I had one hour to do the job or gravity would do it for me.

I let her slip down to fifteen miles and held there, gyros protesting. The mist thickened. I rang the crash alarm, sending all hands who were not actually engaged in the running of the ship to their quarters and the crash-hammocks. My hands were icy cold.

The _Eagle_ sank slowly down to five miles and hung there like a ball bouncing on a jet of water. The mist billowed about us, turning radioactive from the vicious lashing of the tail-flare.

I knew that the weather was perfectly clear perhaps two hundred yards away from the ship, but the weather-plant was creating the soggy weather it liked and I was being effectively blindfolded by the--

Blindfolded!

I grabbed for the interphone. "Bat!" I yelled, "Bat! Can you see anything below?"

Old Bat knew right away what I wanted, but his answer wasn't what I wanted to hear. "Too much metal under me, Morley ... too much metal." His voice was unsteady and seamed with pain.

I glanced at the chronometer. Thirty seven minutes left. And the fog clung to the ports.

"Morley," Bat sounded something like himself for just a minute. "I've got a notion. Maybe ... maybe it will work. Break out a pressure-suit and get the craneman on the ball. And Morley...." Here I could imagine that he was smiling. "... break out a bottle of the skipper's bonded stuff, will you?"

"What are you dreaming up?" I demanded anxiously.

"We have to get this cargo down," Bat said thinly. "You remember what the Foundation man said before we left ... people need food, Morley...."

"What are you thinking about?" I asked again, and then as realization came, I added angrily: "Never mind that! I know what you're planning Bat, and you can forget it! I'll get this can down all right!"

The voice from the interphone was dry as dust. "Like hell you will. Who are you kidding?"

I had no answer there. Without UVR to guide me, I was blind. I didn't have a chance to get the _Eagle_ down, and we both knew it.

"I'm coming up," Bat said, "The automatics can take care of things down here now."

I glanced at the chronometer. Twenty-two minutes to go. Bat was right. The autos could carry on in the tuberoom now. I felt them cut into the circuit.

My heart was heavy as I called a craneman into control to handle the equipment. Together we unlimbered a pressure-suit from the locker. Then I found the skipper's rations and uncorked a bottle. In a moment Bat was in Control. When I saw him my stomach muscles tightened. He looked as though he'd been broiled. His face was a swollen mass of angry flesh and his clothes were seared into his hide. Every movement must have been sheer hell for him, but he staggered into the suit and made himself fast to the Control crane.

Before calling for the steelglas helmet, he reached thirstily for the skipper's bottle and took a long pull.

"Ahhh," he breathed, "That's fine stuff ... real fine." He offered me the bottle, grinning painfully. "Have one on me, Morley...."

* * * * *

I let the fiery liquor drive down the lump that was sticking in my throat and handed Bat the bottle. He finished it in two swallows, looked at it regretfully, and tossed it aside. It landed in the corner of Control where it lay, rocking senselessly back and forth with the jolting movements of the boat.

Bat fastened his helmet on and started for the valve. I wanted to reach out and stop him, but I couldn't. I wanted to say something to him ... but what? How do you thank a man for buying your life with his own? What do you say to pay a man for his pain and his torture?

That's right. You don't say anything. And neither did I. You just stand there and watch, with your heart a lump of lead inside you. I did that, and no more.

He turned toward me just as the inner valve closed on him and the cable he dragged behind him. "See ya," he said with a clumsy wave. And then he was outside in that radioactive mist of death, riding the crane out and down. Hanging by a thin cable in that stinking fog and using his useless mutational powers to save the hides of his ship and shipmates ... _and_ the load of weather-plant that meant food to the stay-at-homes.

The mass-ratio altimeter gave its last reading--four miles--and then it was through, its sensitive coils thrown out of phase by the mass of the planetary globe under us. Here, now, was where UVR should have taken over.

But there was no UVR. Only a man hanging at the end of a cable in a glowing mist that was burning his last chance of life out of him.

I heard his instructions clearly over the small panel set. "About three miles up now."

I let the _Eagle_ down slowly. Two miles. One. Hold. Three thousand feet. Two. One. Hold. Five hundred feet. Hold. Mojave Desert right under us. Baldy off to the right. Lancaster about twenty miles north. Down easy....

The tail-flare was splashing against the desert beneath now, turning the clinging mist into a ruddy shroud. A glance at the chronometer showed about three minutes fuel.

"Let ... her ... down ... slow." Bat's voice was fading fast as the terrific heat seared him and the radiation burned deep.

The fuel should be gone now. No time left. Two hundred feet, one hundred, fifty, thirty....

I heard Bat's voice sob just once through the radio. "Oh ... dear God...!" And that was all.

No time. No fuel.

Silence!

The thunder of the jets stopped abruptly, leaving a frightening void. The _Eagle_ slewed about sickeningly and dropped the remaining thirty feet like so much lead. There was a rending crash as her tail section crumpled, battered plates sinking into the sand, and then she settled wearily to a halt amid the bubbling magma of atomized earth....

* * * * *

So the pilot-shipment of weather-plant got here all right, and it exceeded the Holcomb Foundation's fondest hopes. It brought fertility where there had been only barrenness. Long rows of it still bring richness and life to the soil and the danger of famine is gone forever.

Just remember now, the next time you take the Pacific stratojet. Look under you at that garden of plenty. See the rows upon rows of richly bearing plants. Look too at the interstices where a tiny Venusian moss called "weather-plant" makes it all possible.

Bat Kendo? He died. He died doing what he wanted to do, and that's something. The others maybe weren't so lucky. Of course you never heard of Bat, or of the _Eagle_ for that matter. All this happened a long, long time ago, and the old memories tarnish. Now people take their lives pretty much as they find it, and they never wonder about the guys who made it what it is.

Yes, humans are a strange breed. Like I say ... forgetful. Very forgetful.