he was able to switch off the G-belt.
The room settled down to a steady gravity-pull of two Gs again.
“Will this take long?” asked the Monitor suddenly.
O’Mara had almost forgotten the Major during the past hectic seconds. He did his best to make his voice sound both natural and as if it was coming from the next room as he replied, “It might. Could you call back later?”
“I’ll wait,” said the Monitor.
For the next few minutes O’Mara tried to forget the bruising he had received despite the protection given him by the heavy spacesuit, and concentrate on thinking his way out of this latest mess. He was beginning to see what must have happened.
When two anti-gravity generators of the same power and frequency were used close together, a pattern of interference was set up which affected the stability of both. The grids in O’Mara’s quarters were merely a temporary job and powered by a generator similar to the one used in his suit, though normally a difference in frequency was built in against the chance of such instability occurring. But O’Mara had been fiddling with the grid settings constantly for the past five weeks — every time the infant had a bath, to be exact-so that he must have unknowingly altered the frequency.
He didn’t know what he had done wrong and there wasn’t enough time to try fixing it if he had known. Gingerly, O’Mara switched on his G-belt again and slowly began increasing power. It registered over three quarters of a G before the first signs of instability appeared.
Four Gs less three-quarters made a little over three Gs. It looked, O’Mara thought grimly, like he was going to have to do this the hard way …
V
O’Mara closed his helmet quickly, then strung a cable from his suit mike to the communicator so that he would be able to talk without Caxton or the Monitor realizing that he was sealed inside his suit. If he was to have time to complete the treatment they must not suspect that there was anything out of the ordinary going on here. Next came the final adjustments to the air-pressure regulator and gravity grids.
Inside two minutes the atmosphere pressure in the two rooms had multiplied six times and the gravity apparent was four Gs-the nearest, in fact, that O’Mara could get to “ordinary conditions” for a Hudlarian. With shoulder muscles straining and cracking with the effort-for his under-powered G-belt took only three-quarters of a gravity off the four-G pull in the room — he withdrew the incredibly awkward and ponderous thing which his arm had become from the grid servicing space and rolled heavily onto his back.
He felt as if his baby was sitting on his chest, and large, black blotches hung throbbing before his eyes. Through them he could see a section of ceiling and, at a crazy angle, the vision panel. The face in it was becoming impatient.
“I’m back, Major,” gasped O’Mara. He fought to control his breathing so that the words would not be squeezed out too fast. “I suppose you want to hear my side of the accident?”
“No,” said the Monitor. “I’ve heard the tape Caxton made. What I’m curious about is your background prior to coming here. I’ve checked up and there is something which doesn’t quite fit..
A thunderous eruption of noise blasted into the conversation. Despite the deeper note caused by the increased air pressure O’Mara recognized the signal for what it was; the FROB was angry and hungry.
With a mighty effort O’Mara rolled onto his side, then propped himself up on his elbows. He stayed that way for a while gathering strength to roll over onto his hands and knees. But when he finally accomplished this he found that his arms and legs were swelling and felt as if they would burst from the pressure of blood piling up in them. Gasping, he eased himself down flat onto his chest. Immediately the blood rushed to the front of his body and his vision began to red out.
He couldn’t crawl on hands and knees nor wriggle on his stomach. Most certainly, under three Gs, he could not stand up and walk. What else was there?
O’Mara struggled onto his side again and rolled back, but this time with his elbows propping him up. The neck-rest of his suit supported his head, but the insides of the sleeves were very lightly padded and his elbows hurt. And the strain of holding up even part of his three times heavier than normal body made his heart pound. Worst of all, he was beginning to black out again.
Surely there must be some way to equalize, or at least distribute, the pressures in his body so that he could stay conscious and move. O’Mara tried to visualize the layout of the acceleration chairs which had been used in ships before artificial gravity came along. It had been a not-quite prone position, he remembered suddenly, with the knees drawn up …
Inching along on his elbows, bottom and feet, O’Mara progressed snail-like toward the bedroom. His embarrassment of riches where muscles were concerned was certainly of use now-in these conditions any ordinary man would have been plastered helplessly against the floor. Even so it took him fifteen minutes to reach the food sprayer in the bedroom, and during practically every second of the way the baby kept up its earsplitting racket. With the increased pressure the noise was so tremendously loud and deep that every bone in O’Mara’s body seemed to vibrate to it.
“I’m trying to talk to you!” the Monitor yelled during a lull. “Can’t you keep that blasted kid shut up!”
“It’s hungry,” said O’Mara. “It’ll quiet down when it’s fed …
The food sprayer was mounted on a trolley and O’Mara had fitted a pedal control so as to leave both hands free for aiming. Now that his patient was immobilized by four gravities he didn’t have to use his hands. Instead he was able to nudge the trolley into position with his shoulders and depress the pedal with his elbow. The high- pressure jet ten4ed to bend floorward owing to the extra gravity but he did finally manage to cover the infant with food. But cleaning the affected areas of food compound was another matter. The water jet, which handled very awkwardly from floor level, had no accuracy at all. The best he could manage was to wash down the wide, vivid blue patch-formed from three separate patches which had grown together — which covered nearly one quarter of its total skin area.
After that O’Mara straightened out his legs and lowered his back gently to the floor. Despite the three Gs acting on him, the strain of maintaining that half-sitting position for the last half hour made him feel almost comfortable.
The baby had stopped crying.
“What I was about to say,” said the Monitor heavily when the silence looked like lasting for a few minutes, “was that your record on previous jobs does not fit what I find here. Previously you were, as you are now, a restless, discontented type, but you were invariably popular with your colleagues and only a little less so with your superiors-this last being because your superiors were sometimes wrong and you never were …
“I was every bit as smart as they were,” said O’Mara tiredly, “and proved it often. But I didn’t look intelligent, I had mucker written all over me!”
It was strange, O’Mara thought, but he felt almost disinterested in his own personal trouble now. He couldn’t take his eyes off the angry blue patch on the infant’s side. The color had deepened and also the center of the patch seemed to have swelled. It was as if the super-hard tegument had softened and the FROB’s enormous internal pressure had produced a swelling. Increasing the gravity and pressure to the Hudlarian normal should, he hoped, halt that particular development — if it wasn’t a symptom of something else entirely.
O’Mara had thought of carrying his idea a step further and spraying the air around the patient with food compound. On Hudlar the natives’ food was comprised of tiny organisms floating in their super-thick atmosphere, but then again the handbook expressly stated that food particles must be kept away from the affected areas of tegument, so that the extra gravity and pressure should be enough …
Nevertheless,” the Monitor was saying, “if a similar accident had happened on one of your previous jobs, your story would have been believed. Even if it had been your fault they would have rallied around to defend you from outsiders like myself.
“What caused you to change from a friendly, likeable type of personality to this …
