Pete’s face reflected a mind wrestling with problems far too big for it. “There are a couple of other things, Jane. One is that we haven’t found a sign of any living quarters on this ship.”
“We haven’t covered it all yet. That spiral stairway wasn’t more than twelve feet. This level is sandwiched between the lofts upstairs and whatever is down below.”
“That’s true. But what kind of a ship would have living quarters below and after? At least the officers would be quartered forward and above center. Another thing—the control room was obviously where we found the brain. But there wasn’t a chair in the place. I don’t think the Captain would stand up all the way across the System.”
“The cybernetic brain is the pilot and the captain and everything else, Pete.”
“Have you got some definite reason for thinking—?”
Jane’s nerves were raw too. She jerked away and appeared close to tears. “I don’t need a reason! I’m telling you. You’re right. There isn’t any crew on this ship! The ship is run by that—that mind up there! It’s following me all over the ship!”
“It isn’t following you, Jane,” Pete said gently. “You just keep bumping into the emanations.”
“You and your emanations! If you’re so smart, why can’t you think of a way to get us out of this mess?”
“Getting us out might be up to you.”
“Oh? That’s just great!”
“You’ve got to see what you can do with that cybernetic unit!”
“I have to! I’m no scientist. I don’t know anything about electrophysics!”
“No, but a lot of electrophysicists would give half their education to have what you’ve got.”
“All I’ve got is a muddled head. Besides, I’m thirsty.”
“Then let’s go back. Maybe they’ve got some ice melted by this time.”
They went back and found that Rachel Barry had found the unit, but Ellen had figured out how it worked. She was jumping up and down and clapping her hands as a stream of water flowed into the pan.
“Did you see Colleen anywhere?” Rachel asked.
“No,” Pete said. “Didn’t she turn up?”
“That young one! I don’t know what I’m going to do with her!”
Pete had an excellent suggestion. Take the little character over the maternal knee and wallop her good. He did not voice it, however. He was having a hard enough time soothing Jane for the job that lay ahead. He didn’t want any more flaring tempers.
“I think we ought to stay together. At any minute we may have a couple of pirates climbing over our frames. We’d better—”
“If you think you’re going to find any weapons, you might as well forget it,” Jane said flatly.
Pete didn’t question her. He was willing to concede that she knew more about the ship by instinct and mental rapport than he could possibly guess.
“All right. Then the thing to do is see if we can find a way to lift this derelict out of here. I guess we’ll have to split up regardless. Why don’t Mrs. Barry and Ellen try to find Colleen and then check some of that food in the upper holds. These kids are going to have to eat.”
There were no objections, so Pete left Rachel and Ellen Barry to search that area and went aloft, Jane going with him without objection.
But when they reached the doorway to the cabin where the brain was housed, she drew back. “I can’t go in there yet, Pete.”
“But Jane! You’ve got to.”
“I know. Just give me a few more minutes. Let’s go back into one of those empty holds until my brain stops rattling.”
Pete stopped and faced her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I—well, I don’t quite know how to say it, but I want you to know. I’ve got a lot of admiration for you—for your courage.”
Jane smiled. “How about my evil temper? My raspy, hostile disposition?”
“I’m no saint, myself. In fact, I’m not very brave. I’m scared most of the time.”
“You’ll do, then, till a brave man comes along. Fighting it out here with a family hanging around your neck.”
“Actually, I think your mother’s great. And I like the kids—”
A shriek reached their ears. It came faintly at first, but it was enough to stiffen them. Gradually it increased in volume as the screamer, obviously on the move, came closer.
“They got in the ship!” Pete exclaimed in horror. “They’re chasing one of the girls.”
Jane had tensed up, but her look, a puzzled one, questioned that. “It’s Colleen. She’s terrorized. She wouldn’t react that way to an ordinary man.”
“Unless he shot at her—wounded her!”
Jane turned pale. “Oh, no!”
They had run from the hold and were rushing along the companionway. They reached the stairs as the still-screaming Colleen was climbing them. She threw herself at Jane and clung to her in agony of terror.
“Dead!” she babbled. “Hundreds of them. People just lying there! Then you touch them and they disappear!”
Jane held her small sister close. She stared at Pete in consternation. “What can she be talking about?”
“I don’t know, Pete said as he went to one knee and grasped Colleen by the shoulders. “But we’d better find out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
INVASION
“In there!”
They had partially quieted the hysterical Colleen. The task was accomplished by Rachel Barry, whom they had met in the companionway along which she’d been running in response to the screams. Then Colleen led them to another of the spiral staircases she’d discovered not far from the one Ellen’s sharp eyes had found. They’d gone down a much longer spiral this time until Pete knew they were in the heretofore hidden bottom section of the ship.
There, Ellen had pointed to a door she’d left open in her panicky flight. Pete led the way in. But he stopped in the doorway and Jane had to push him on in to make room.
“What is it, Pete?” Then she too stopped and stared.
It was a vast, low-ceilinged hold—a dormitory; one in which at least five hundred people were asleep. They lay on low beds set in uniform rows from one end of the dormitory to the other. They lay in various positions of repose, and it would not have been illogical to expect some of them to awaken and sit up and protest the invasion.
Pete walked slowly forward while the others stayed clustered around the entrance. Behind him, he heard Colleen whimper. “They’re dead! They’re all dead! All the people in here!”
The shock of it hit Pete also, as they stood there, frozen by the macabre, brooding aura of the dormitory. There were some two hundred bodies—men, women, and children who, at some past distant moment, had died there on that ship. There had apparently been no panic. The unfortunates had been sitting, standing, evidently walking about. And death appeared to have come quickly. Gas perhaps, Peter thought. When the brain went wrong, something went wrong in here.
“That was the one I touched,” Colleen said as she pointed in dazed terror. “It was—cold!” She buried her face against her mother and clung desperately.
“Yes, dear,” Rachel Barry said gently. “But it’s over now. There is an explanation, I’m sure.” She glanced about and frowned. “It’s difficult to breathe in here.”
“Let’s get out,” Pete said. When they were back in the companionway, he closed the door after them. Rachel and the two younger girls looked at him wordlessly for the explanation Rachel had so confidently mentioned. But it was Jane who gave it. She spoke in a quiet, awed monotone.
“They’ve been dead for a thousand years. They were traveling on this ship and something happened. The air suddenly left the place they’re in. It was cut off and they died quickly.”
“But they would have struggled,” Pete murmured.
Again, Jane would brook no dissension. “That�
�s the way it was. We may never know exactly what killed them, but that was the way it was. Whatever happened damaged the brain at the same time. They lay there dead for centuries while this ship went wherever it went and finally came here, into the Belt and into the Badlands.”
“Where were they coming from?” Pete asked. “Where were they supposed to be going?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter right now. The important thing is our survival. It hinges on getting out of here. And I’ve got an idea about that.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll talk to those men. We’ll give them the ship if they’ll let us leave.”
“You mean you’re afraid?”
Pete was a trifle slow in answering. “Yes.”
“No you’re not. The Masons were never the kind to run away from a fight. You’re worried about us.”
“I’m worried about me,” Pete said.
“You’re about as convincing as a square spaceship, but it doesn’t make any difference. You know those men would never let us go. We could make a complaint. That would start an investigation. They don’t want one. It would be easier to kill us.”
“That’s one thing about the Belt that’s bad,” Pete muttered. “Murder is so easy to get away with.”
“Our salvation lies elsewhere,” Jane said. “We’ve got to lift this ship out of here.”
“Good idea. But I don’t happen to be up on cybernetic brains.”
“Well go to the control cabin. We’ll take the brain’s lid off. I’ll be able to tell you what to do—I hope.”
Pete realized what an effort this was on Jane’s part, but he didn’t highlight the point. “All right. Let’s go.”
Jane turned to her mother. “You three go back to the escape hatch and keep watch. Stay on the stairs and watch the door. If it starts to heat up, let us know. That will mean they’ve got a light-ray, and we’re in trouble.”
Ellen stared innocently. “I thought we were in trouble already.”
Jane patted her cheek. “No, dear. We’re just on a little picnic. Go with Mother and have fun.”
“I wish I could talk to Homer,” Rachel Barry said. “I’m sure…”
“The only thing we can be sure of is that we’ve got to get this ship out of here,” Pete said. “Let’s go.”
When they got to the control cabin, Jane stared silently at the cybernetic unit. Her face was empty, expressionless, her eyes vacant, unfocused.
Pete waited, then asked a question that sounded silly even in his own ears. “Is it telling you anything?”
“Be quiet.”
Pete moved away, around the shining globe. He studied it and learned nothing. To occupy his mind he allowed it to drift to the mystery of the ship itself and to toy with the idea that had been forming behind the preoccupations of the immediate present.
Who were the people of dust? What had they been? What great cosmic adventure had ended here in the Badlands of the Belt? What incredible space operation had been thwarted by the margin for error that lay in simple mechanical breakdown? And all of it had happened a thousand years ago.
“You’ll have to leave,” Jane said. “Your thoughts keep getting in my way.”
Pete walked back around the globe. Jane came within range of his vision and he looked at her with undisguised awe. She had changed. She was still a teen-age kid, but—he searched his mind for words to define the change that had come over her. It was all in her face. Her face had grown up somehow. There were no words. Then he found one.
Jane was beautiful.
“I’ll go outside,” he said.
He wandered back to the vacant holds and pondered the riddle of a ship without jets; apparently without facilities for cobalt fusion. Nothing less, that Pete was aware of, could move this ship at the speed his overall theory demanded.
He drove the ponderings from his mind. There just wasn’t enough to go on. Not enough data. Not enough knowledge.
One point kept haunting him, however. He remembered the things he’d learned about Barco Village back on Mars. Definite marks of two different races had been found there. The artifacts uncovered indicated a race of normal size—a six-foot average height. But others in a different section of the Village indicated a far smaller race; a people that did not exceed three feet. The logical answer—the smaller one being the children of the larger—did not hold water because of the nature of the artifacts themselves. Exhaustive study practically verified this.
Thus, Pete was shaken by what he’d found in the dormitories below. Apparently the others, their minds clouded by shock, hadn’t noticed the thing that caught Pete’s eye. The bodies down there were different. There were normal-sized corpses and others that could have been mistaken at first glance for children. But they were not children. They were adults; miniature replicas of the larger ones on the surface, but Pete was sure closer examination would reveal enough differences to make them a different race.
Was this wildest coincidence, or was Pete justified in associating this weird derelict with Barco Village on Mars?
Then, at this point, Pete had no trouble in snapping his mind back to the present because things began happening very fast. He’d been staring out through the hull at nothing in particular, but his eyes had been pointed at the place the pirate’s craft had been hurled back to destruction. The scene had been static, but now he caught movement. A figure struggled from the wreck.
Homer Deeds.
Homer, obviously in great pain, had one hand pressed against his side where his ribs had possibly been caved in. The other fist gripped a hand jet and Homer’s attention was centered grimly on the derelict. As Pete watched, Homer pushed agonizingly off into space, the hand jet pulling him slowly toward the ship.
What was going on? Where were the other two pirates? Pete ran from the loft toward the lower companionway and got the news from Ellen at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mother sent me to get you! The door is heating up.”
“Those men are—”
“They’ve got a cutter!” Pete cried and ran back along the companionway.
He found Rachel and little Colleen at the foot of the stairs looking up at the door. Rachel greeted him with a calm little smile.
“They’re cutting the door away,” she said. “When they come in, I’ll talk to them.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Pete retorted.
“Now, Peter, I’m a little older than you are.”
“I don’t care if you’re older than the planets, you’re going to take those two kids and run and hide. And the longer you stay hidden, the longer you’ll live.”
“But Pete…a little reason…”
“Get going!”
Her poise shaken by Pete’s almost savage assumption of command, Rachel Barry seized her younger daughters’ hands and the three of them hurried forward. There was the impression that perhaps Rachel was in a hurry to get away from Pete more so than from the pirates outside.
Left to himself, Pete put into action a pathetic little plan he’d formulated earlier, not because it was brilliant, but because it was the only thing to do.
There was a ledge above the door the pirates were now cutting away; room up there for one man to crouch and wait—and jump from when the right moment came if it ever did.
That moment would be when the two pirates entered and started down the stairs. If they came one at a time, however, the ruse would add up to nothing; also, if one of them happened to look up and see Pete squatting there.
But even if it worked perfectly, Pete could still kill himself. The stairs were steep and everything down there was hard metal. Still, he had to try.
Getting up on the ledge wasn’t the easiest thing Pete had ever done, but he made it and while he sat waiting for the door to crash in he realized he’d forgotten to tell Rachel w
here Jane was and to get her and take her into hiding also. It was too late to correct this blunder, though, because the light-ray had already cut through and a thin slit was lengthening along one edge of the door. Pete crouched there, wondering what it felt like to break your back—your back and maybe both legs and most of your ribs. The thought wasn’t pleasant, and he got rid of it by concentrating on the light unit’s efficient work as it went around a corner and began moving across the top of the door. Another corner, then the last one and the light was moving across the bottom.
The door held to the last inch of metal. Then it collapsed; but backward, not forward, and Pete heard the two pirates curse and leap out of the way.
Then a head appeared. “Nobody in sight,” the owner of the head announced.
“What did you expect,” the other pirate growled, “a welcoming committee? Get on down there.”
They came together, neither willing to let the other get a head start. Pete tensed. He thought of Homer Deeds painfully pulling himself to the ship in order to get in on the looting, and jumped.
He tried not to close his eyes, but it was impossible to look at all that metal coming to meet him and his lids were tight shut when he hit the rear one and smashed him down against the one in front.
They’d both heard Pete after it was too late and had partially turned. The rear man had thrown up his hand, the one with the rifle in it, and Pete’s shin bone cracked against the steel. This caused the first pain that shot through him. But there were others as the three of them tumbled down the stairway and hit the hard floor of the companionway.
There were mixed roars of pain and protest and, for a few moments, a mad scramble of three tangled bodies.
The forward man fared best. He’d instinctively lunged away from the danger and was almost off the stairway when the plummeting body of the second man caught him across the backs of his ankles and brought him down in a whipping action that slapped his face against the floor. The first blood of the encounter came from his nose.
He came up with a bellow of rage and crawled free while Pete and the rear pirate were still tangled. Pete knew pure terror now, during the split second he put his body back into action. This was a weird moment with time seeming to stand still and his mind as clear as a crystal. Was anything broken? Pain shot through his left arm and he was sure his right hip had been smashed.
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