Wormbender's Circus
Chapter 20

The ever-present backdrop of Sagittarius remained undisturbed. Casey got up to make a cup of coffee. As he did so, the distress signal sounded.

“Uh oh,” said Casey.

The anguished face of a woman, streaks of blonde hair trailing wildly across it, appeared on a monitor.

“This is Casey MacArthur of the Semiramis,” Casey announced. “Do you have a problem?”

"Semiramis, this is Susan Quirk of the solar sailor Helium Cowboy. I need your help urgently. My husband, Ralph Quirk, has been taken ill. We have limited medical supplies on board. He needs to be transported to Jansky as soon as possible. Can you assist, please?”

Casey turned to the others and sighed. “I don’t believe this is happening to us. Really I don’t.” He turned back to the monitor.

"Helium Cowboy. Responding to your call, we will be with you a.s.a.p.” He directed the ship to home onto the co-ordinates of the Helium Cowboy with maximum speed. The Semiramis fired her engines and banked sharply to race back the way she had come.

“In the meantime, could you give us some details of your husband’s illness?”

“Thank you Semiramis. Pain in the lower abdomen, spasms, retractive respiration, temperature of 38.9, elevated white blood cell count. Is that appendicitis or is that appendicitis?”

Zoe nodded. “It sure sounds like it. Has she got treatment?”

"Helium Cowboy, do you have medication aboard?”

“Just the basics, Semiramis.”

Zoe sighed again, and muttered audibly, “Doesn’t anyone carry a full medkit these days?”

It was not clear if Susan Quirk heard the remark or not. She continued, “I have stabilised my husband’s condition, but it needs urgent neutralisation.”

“We’re on our way, Helium Cowboy,” Casey reassured her.

As the Semiramis sped towards her, Susan Quirk helped her husband into a spacesuit, then clambered into one herself. She softly cursed the fate that had dropped her into the situation she was in. Her husband Ralph’s intended partner for the race had been Charlie Bolini, who had planned to take some time off from his engineering business to take part. Due to unforeseen circumstances, however, Charlie’s business had taken a turn for the worse, and he had had to turn his full attention to rescuing it. At short notice, Ralph had been unable to replace anyone to step into Charlie’s shoes, so he had persuaded Susan to come along, as the rules of the race required that every ship be double-handed.

Susan was not a keen space traveller at the best of times, and living for weeks in the cramped quarters of the Helium Cowboy had certainly not been the best of times. The conditions in the Cowboy were primitive, to say the least. The ship did not even have an artificial gravity generator. But her husband had had his heart set on taking part in the race, and so, in order not to let him down, she had agreed to come along. “Just to make up the numbers,” she had said.

The first part of the trip had indeed been good, from Jansky out in a wide loop, circling through the star cloud, where the master mariners had truly shown their mettle, weaving their way through the spaces between the stars, and carefully trimming their giant sails to take advantage of turbulent currents of hydrogen, helium and other elements.

All along, the Helium Cowboy had remained doggedly in last place, her progress slowed still further when a piece of space debris had ripped a large gash in the sail. Ralph had had to suit up and go out on a backpack to seal it up, while Susan did her best to carry out his instructions.

The star cloud had been a profoundly moving experience for her, and had made all the privations of the trip worthwhile. She thought Ralph had also appreciated it, though it was hard to tell with Ralph: expressing his feelings, or even indicating that he had any to express, had never been his strong suit.

And then the warning signs had started to appear. He had complained of pain in his right side, then of nausea, and he had thrown up his dinner into the zero-g toilet. Not a pleasant experience, Susan mused. The pain had then become localised in his lower abdomen, accompanied by the rigidity that Susan knew to be characteristic of appendicitis, and she began to feel a wave of panic building inside her.

She had given Ralph what little assistance the medkit could offer, and was about to send out an emergency signal to Jansky when she noticed on the scanner a blip that wasn’t another sailor. The records had identified it as a freighter called the Semiramis, and she had called it up.

As the Semiramis drew closer, she began the job of wrestling Ralph into his suit. Every move seemed to elicit a howl of pain from her husband. She fitted his helmet over his head, then began suiting up herself. She wondered as she did so why it was that with so many technical advances in other areas, the EVA suit still resembled nothing so much as a mediaeval instrument of torture.

Her reverie was interrupted by Casey’s solicitous face appearing on the monitor once more. “Helium Cowboy, this is Semiramis. We have you in visual contact. We will be alongside in a few moments.”

“Thank you, Semiramis. You got here in record time.” She was truly grateful to be able to pass on to someone else the burden of responsibility.

She snapped on the backpack, grateful, for once, for the lack of gravity, which rendered the otherwise cumbersome pack weightless. Awkwardly she propelled the two of them into the airlock and closed the door behind them.

As the outer door opened, she felt a lump in her throat. Just over the threshold was space, infinite nothing. She stared at it in trepidation for a moment, then, swallowing hard, she gave the thruster control on the backpack a gentle push. The thrusters fired briefly, and she was out of the ship, pulling Ralph after her.

With one hand she grabbed a rail on the hull, clamping the other arm ever tighter around her husband’s chest. She paused a moment, fearful and disoriented, then realised that the `Semiramis’ was on the other side of the ship, hovering as close as Casey dared bring it in the shadow of the vast sail.

Another burn of the thruster, a longer one this time, lifted Susan and Ralph vertically, so they became visible to Casey, Sebastian and Zoe.

“Where are we?” murmured Ralph, in the grip of a fever. “What’s going on?”

“It’s all right, darling,” Susan cooed. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She thrust away over the top of the ship, and turned by degrees towards the waiting Semiramis. She had not used the backpack before, and found turning particularly difficult. She had to give precisely the right amount of burn to point where she wanted to go, and overcorrected several times before she got the hang of it. With Ralph groaning beside her, she fired the thrusters to cross the intervening space to the incongruous-looking circus ship.

As she did so, the ship’s outer airlock door opened to welcome her. With a sigh of relief, she grabbed the rail at its edge and swung herself and Ralph inside. Taken unawares by the ship’s artificial gravity, she collapsed in a heap inside the airlock. The outer door slid closed, and the lock filled with air.

The inner door opened, and Sebastian and Zoe were helping her out of the airlock. Zoe released the catch on her helmet and pulled it off her head, while Sebastian, aided by Igor, pulled Ralph through the door into the cargo hold.

Zoe started to remove Susan’s backpack. “No, no,” said Susan anxiously. “Just take Ralph. I’ll have to go back and look after the ship.” She watched as Ralph was unceremoniously carried away. “He’d never forgive me if anything happened to it.”

Zoe twitched a querulous eyebrow.

“Just please hurry to Jansky,” said Susan. “I’ll be fine.”

She put her helmet back on and stepped back into the airlock. Her transit back to the Helium Cowboy was much smoother. By the time she got back to her own airlock, the Semiramis was gone.

Casey sent a signal to the colony on Jansky, alerting them to the arrival of an emergency patient. Meanwhile, Sebastian prepared the ship for the short jump which would catapult them across space in minutes. Indeed, it took more time to calculate the jump than would be necessary to execute it.

Already the ship had overhauled the solar sailors bringing up the rear of the fleet, hammering past them as if they were standing still.

Zoe was watching over Ralph as he lay on Sebastian’s bed.

“Where’s Susan?” he murmured.

“She went back to look after your ship,” said Zoe, a little tersely. “She seemed to think you’d want her to do that.”

Ralph winced. Zoe was not sure if it was on account of the pain or because of what his wife was doing. “She didn’t need to do that,” he said after a pause. “She’s one hell of a wife.”

“She certainly is,” said Zoe. She gently palped his left side. “How does that feel?”

“Sore.”

“Hmph,” said Zoe.

“What is it?” said Ralph.

“Peritonitis. I think.”

“Zoe,” said Casey through the intercom.

“Yes, Case.”

“We’re about to make the jump.”

“Okay.”

After the jump, Jansky quickly appeared on the screen. A reddish-brown globe slightly larger than the Earth, named after the pioneer of radio astronomy, it had been successfully colonised for some fifty years. The planet yielded water and enough minerals to make it self-sufficient in building materials, and the soil was beginning to offer good yields. It was the closest inhabited world to the star cloud, which had made it the natural choice for the start and finish of the solar sailors’ regatta.

Zoe looked with dismay at Ralph’s pallid, sweaty face and body. She cradled his head in the crook of her arm and gave him water to ease his thirst. She saw his temperature had risen to 39.5 with no indication that it would level off. The rhythm of his heart also gave her cause for concern.

“Casey, we better get down fast. This is one mighty sick man.”

“We’re in orbit now, Zo. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Casey was true to his word. In minutes, the Semiramis was making a dramatic landing amid clouds of dust on the edge of the town of Jansky. Even as the dust settled, an ambulance raced from among the buildings.

Together, Sebastian, Zoe, Casey and Igor lifted Ralph as tenderly as they were able, and carried him to the elevator tube. Sebastian and Zoe carried him into the elevator between them and dropped down to ground level. There the ambulance men were waiting with an AGG, an Anti-Gravitational Gurney, onto which Ralph was laid and quickly installed in the ambulance.

Casey joined Sebastian and Zoe on the ground. A crowd of people was moving towards them, and among them the three travellers could see the cameras of news reporters.

“How the hell did they get here?” gasped Sebastian. It seemed to him as if he would never escape from the media.

“It’s my guess,” said Casey, “that they’re here to cover the regatta. We happen to have provided them with a nice little side story.”

Sebastian eyed the journalists warily. Some were his own employees, others were Karel Lichinsky’s people. He hadn’t thought about Lichinsky in a while, and thinking about him now made him shudder.

The crowd approached. Cameras were rolling. It undoubtedly made a good shot, thought Sebastian, the three of them together, with their trusty ship in the background.

“Mr. Wormbender, you and your crew have undoubtedly saved this man’s life. How does it feel to be a hero?”

Sebastian looked quizzically at the questioner. Was this man angling for a promotion or what? Sebastian shrugged. “Nothing heroic about it. We were just in the right place at the right time.” It was, he realised, the thing that all heroes said. “Anyone else would have done the same thing. If you want a hero, that man’s wife is who you should be talking to. She could have come with us, but she opted to stay out there and look after his ship on her own.”

This news prompted a round of applause from the crowd.

“Mr. Wormbender, what brings you to this sector?”

“I had an accident. I broke my leg. So we decided to spend a few days cruising the star cloud. Both the ship and I recharged our batteries together.” There was some polite laughter.

“Mr. Wormbender, how goes the circus project?”

“Well,” said Sebastian with a smile, “our progress has been slower than I would have liked, due to, ah, circumstances beyond our control. We’ve been somewhat sidetracked by a couple of things, but hopefully we’ll now get back into gear and get our show on the road.”

A woman reporter pushed forward, her camera clamped to her shoulder. “Mr. Wormbender,” she smiled, “you are now in charge of one of the largest galacticasting networks ever seen. Do you anticipate a challenge from your principal rival, Mr. Lichinsky?”

Sebastian glared at her. Had Lichinsky put her up to it? He cleared his throat and looked straight into her camera. “I hope Mr. Lichinsky will not be so foolish as to make a challenge for my businesses, as they are categorically not for sale, least of all to him. Any more questions?”