Read Online Statesman by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online

to fight to avoid becoming motion-sick. My driver, evidently acclimatized to this, navigated the throes of the highway with a certain grim enjoyment, almost as if waiting for me to demonstrate my inferiority by grabbing for the barf bag. Give me a nice, straightforward battle in space, any day!
    Then the driver frowned, glancing at his instruments. “Pressure rising,” he muttered in Russian.
    I felt a claustrophobic chill. “Routine?”
    “ Nyet.”
    He hit the Mayday button, and our distress signal was broadcast. The Saturn bubbles were sturdy, for the ambient pressure was over eight bars, or eight times Earth-normal. But that sturdiness went for nothing if there was a leak.
    Now I felt the increase, or imagined I did. “Can we make it to shelter in time?”
    “Have to,” he grunted. But he did not look at all certain.
    “Pinhole leak?” I asked.
    He nodded a grim affirmative. That was about all it could be, to account for the slow increase. Bubblene was tough stuff, about as tough as existed, but sometimes it was flawed, and a leak could develop. Once started, the leak would inevitably increase. The increase could become explosive—or more properly, implosive. Then we would be crushed by the horrendous external pressure.
    “Must plug it,” I said.
    “Can't hold out eight bars!” he muttered fatalistically.
    I suppose he was a typical Saturnine, resigned to the outrages of fortune. I was not. “Can if we spot the leak in time,” I said.
    I cast about for a mechanism. Here the driver helped. “Got a pipe,” he said.
    “A what?”
    He brought it out. “Bacco. Smoke it sometimes.”
    Oh—one of the containers of pseudo tobacco. Some folk still used the stuff, igniting it and sucking in the vapors through a tube below the container. This habit had once been quite widespread, but the deleterious effects it had on the human body caused it to be outlawed several centuries ago. Today the only remnant of it was the harmless imitation. But this had one immediate advantage, in this crisis: It generated a minute quantity of smoke.
    He filled and lit his pipe, puffed on it, and held it before him. A curl of smoke wafted up from it.
    He moved it slowly about, the smoke following. The process was infuriatingly slow, in the fractional gee used to make the car float, but this was all we had.
    When he held the pipe low, we got a deviation. “Draft,” he said.
    “You trace it down; I'll get a tool!” I said. I cast about for something suitable. If this had been space, there would have been a repair kit with hull patches. But this was not space, and no ordinary hull patch could withstand eight bars.
    “Toolkit in back,” the man said as he oriented on the slight draft.
    I scrambled back and found it. It was a shoemaker's outfit, with a hammer and stapler and awl.
    Evidently the folk here were strong on hand trades, as perhaps they had to be to make up for the interminable delays and inordinate expense of necessary articles. But this car was no shoe!
    “Found it,” the driver said. He was down on the floor now, and the pipe smoke was swirling violently.
    There was a leak, all right.
    If only I had something to plug it! But shoe cement would never hold, and I couldn't hammer in a staple.
    Then I perceived the obvious. The awl! It was a slender rod of metal, almost needle-thin, with a rounded plastic ball on the end. That was exactly what I needed!
    I grabbed it and joined the driver on the floor. Now I could hear it: the faint hiss of atmosphere pressuring in. Eight bars outside, one bar inside; it would keep coming until the pressure equalized. But an awl, normally used to punch holes in leather, could put a lot of pressure on a small point. More than eight bars' worth.
    I set the point, then pressed it into the tiny hole. If this worked, we would have it plugged; if instead it aggravated the leak, we would be dead that much sooner.
    It worked. The leak stopped. I had, as it were, my finger in the dike.
    “Drive