A battering-ram hammered into my belly. I slammed bent, hitting my head against the knees of the man sitting across from me. The capsule shuddered, smearing some obstruction against its outer wall. There was an instant when I weighed nothing. Then my head snapped back with hangman's violence as the capsule bounced forward a few meters. Then we were still. From the shock to the silence was a matter of ten seconds.
I pulled myself up from the floor. Surprisingly, my skeleton still hinged at the joints and nowhere else. The Bupo man was flat in the aisle, bleeding black splotches into the green carpet. He still had hold of a piece of the water-pitcher's handle. I ignored him, while my brain began to push out explanations for this impossible accident.
Something had gotten into the Tube, that slick intestine we'd ridden through under the Andes, below the Matto Grosso, out under the pampas. Something had got in the way of the hundred hurricanes that pushed us. The eyes and ears and un-man-like senses I'd helped build into this five thousand kilometers of metal gut had stopped the pumps. The vacuum inviting our capsule on had filled with air, no longer tugging us to the terminal nest by the Atlantic. We were abandoned, fifteen meters under God-knows-where.
Mrs. Swaime, who knew that I'd helped in the Tube's engineering, turned to me for explanation. "What happened?" she asked. "What did we hit?"
The foreigner across the aisle, Mr. Rhinklav'n, smiled, a curious effect. "A cow on the track, I believe," he said, his voice brassy with the accent of Mars.
"How did a cow get in here?" Anna demanded. She was the girl whose girl-ness had snagged the eyes and riled the hormones of every male in the car.
"The gentleman is joking," I assured Anna. I glanced toward Surgeon-General Raimazan, the man whose knees had hammered my forehead. He was clutching his right forearm, his eyes squeezed shut by pain. "What happened, Doctor?" I demanded, laying my hand on his shoulder.
"Fractured my arm, my ulna. Get my case under the seat. I want to look at him." The doctor nodded toward the Bupo man, who was struggling to sit up. I got out the doctor's bag.
"Morphine?" I asked, finding it.
"Codeine, next tray, will be plenty." I dropped three of the pills into Dr. Raimazan's left hand. He swallowed them without water. I used my newspaper for a splint, rolling it tight and bandaging it to the doctor's forearm. Then I hammocked the arm in a sling made of a triangular bandage. "OK?" I asked.