Fugitives of the Stars [The Two Thousand Centuries]

by Edmond Hamilton

  He saw Wasek's face.

  He mumbled an attempt at a question, trying desperately to come awake. He heard Wasek answer something about the meteor swarm and he said, “But not yet—next trick, my watch...

  Wasek hauled him bodily erect. “This is your watch, you drunken murdering bastard. Get in there and do something if you can.” And he said something more about Ardric, but Horne didn't hear it. All he could hear now were the noises of the ship screaming and the people screaming and the feet running over the metal floors and the lifeboat hatches clanging. He started to walk the twelve steps to the pilot room, his knees giving under him and his belly weighted down with lead, and then something hit the ship again. Again? Had it been hit before? He couldn't remember with his mind but his body seemed to have a memory of jarring agony and wrenching metal. The lights went out and the corridor tilted upward, then slid away at an insane angle, and Horne went with it into the dark again.

  CHAPTER IV

  HE HEARD the voices long before he opened his eyes. He kept his eyes shut and tried not to listen, hoping that the darkness would claim him again and keep him, this time, forever. But it did not. And there was no escape from the voices.

  One was that of a child, crying. One was that of a woman, crying. The rest were those of men, speaking in the dulled and ragged tones of shock, starting sentences and never finishing them, or repeating sometimes one word or a phrase over and over again. I went forward, see, to get this bucket out of Stores, and that was when ... Just like a piece of torn paper, that bulkhead, my God, I saw it go out ... Nothing left, nothing at all left, not even anything I can bury...

  The woman, between her sobs, just said a name over and over again.

  Horne had to open his eyes at last.

  There were eighteen people in the lifeboat. A woman, a child, and sixteen men.

  One of them was Wasek, with an ugly wound across his left cheek and his tunic stained with blood. He looked at Horne. The other fifteen men looked at Horne. So did the woman, but he did not think she saw him, and the child was crying.

  Horne said, in a voice he did not recognize as his own, “What happened?"

  There was a sound and a movement among the fifteen men. Wasek turned on them.

  "I didn't save his life just for that. I'm not through with him yet. I won't be through with him for a long time."

  Then men subsided. They were too exhausted in their emotions to carry any feeling too far, even the feeling of hatred. Wasek grunted and pointed out the port.

  "That's what happened."

  Horne had already seen. The lifeboat was moving steadily away, its small jets hammering, but it was within sight of the scattered wreckage. Some parts of the Vega Queen were still recognizable as having once been part of a ship. Most of it was unrecognizable as ever having been anything.

  "How many lifeboats got away?"

  "This is it. These are all there are. Eighteen survivors. Eighteen, Horne. Figure out for yourself how many lives you took."

  Horne shook his head. His tongue felt like a stick of wood in his mouth. “I took?” he said. “No, I ... For God's sake, Captain, tell me what happened!"

  The men watched him with cold hating eyes. Cold hate. Yes. He remembered Wasek shaking him, slapping him, saying, You drunken murdering bastard.

  Horne began to shake. “I had one glass of brandy. How can a man get drunk on one glass of brandy?” They did not answer him. Wasek's face was like stone. Horne looked again at the wreckage, and for the third time he said, despairing, “What happened?"

  "The meteor swarm,” said Wasek. “We ran straight into it."

  Horne stared at him. “'Mat isn't possible. We were chartered to clear that swarm by fifteen thousand miles."

  "You set the course up yourself, Horne. It took no account of the swarm..."

  "How can you say that? How do you know? I set the course."

  Wasek went stonily on. “If Ardric had been an experienced pilot, he might have seen it in time, but he wasn't and he didn't, and you were passed out drunk. He was standing your watch for you, taking to cover, and he didn't realize in time."

  "But the course was set! Fifteen thousand miles. We couldn't have got even near the fringe of the swarm!"

  "But we did,” said Wasek. “And there are eighteen survivors."

  He looked at Horne and the others all looked at Horne, all except the woman whose head was bent and who kept saying “Bob” over and over again.

  Horne tried to stop his shaking, which was becoming uncontrollable. He concentrated on stopping it, and when he had succeeded, he made himself think back to when he had plotted that course. When he had had the charts before him, the periodicity of the swarm, relative time, planetary phase time, solar phase time, and the periodic tables all made out for any possible approach.

  He could not have made a mistake.

  Could he?

  Could he be certain he had not made a mistake, in calculation, in punching the tapes, in reading off the results?

  "I don't see how,” he said aloud, to himself, to nobody. “I double-checked them. The coordinates. Carefully, double-checked them. And just before I went off, I checked again. We were on course, everything was as it should be."

  "So good,” said Wasek, “that you figured you could leave it to Ardric to take her in."

  "Captain,” said Horne. “Sir. I had one glass of brandy, just the same as I always had. Ardric can tell you...” he broke off. There were only fifteen men beside Wasek in the lifeboat. It did not take long to see that Ardric's face was not among them. “No. I guess he can't. But it's true all the same..."

  Wasek said, “It isn't the glass of brandy that bothers me. It's the two empty bottles that were in your cabin."

  Horne stared at him blankly. “The what?"

  "I fell over them when I came in. You were drunk, Horne, drunk and snoring like a goddam, swine, and Ardric died at his post trying to salvage something from the error you made in the course.” Wasek leaned a little closer. “My ship, Horne. Ninety-seven crewmen and thirty-eight passengers, including women and children. I'm going to crucify you, Horne. I'm going to hang you up and trail your guts out over the floor."

  Horne did not answer him. There did not seem to be anything more to say. He felt completely stunned, without life or health or the ability to react.

  And he sat, stunned and silent, all the time that it took the lifeboat to limp its slow and overburdened way to a landing on Arcturus III. Sometimes, underneath the pall of shock and horror and self-doubt that covered him—did I make a mistake in the course? I know I didn't get drunk but did I possibly make a mistake in the course?—underneath this pall he was conscious from time to time that his mind was working, ferreting about in dark places, gathering bits and pieces of memory and speculation. He let it alone, too heartsick to care much.

  It wasn't until the surface of Arcturus III was close under them, shaggy with forests and humped with mountains like the back of some monstrous beast, that his mind suddenly spoke to him clearly and said, “Ninety-seven men of the crew and thirty-eight passengers died in that wreck, and Morivenn was one of them, and there were eight men of Skereth aboard besides him—three in his delegation, three others, and Ardric.

  His mind let him ponder that a while, and then it said, “You did not drink two bottles of brandy in your cabin."

  These two things were statements. After them, still later, came a question.

  "How do you know that only one lifeboat got away?"

  He could only answer that Wasek had said so, which in turn led to the question, “How does he know?"

  There was no answer to that.

  His mind scurried and scrabbled some more, and after a time, when the retro-jets were blasting, it said, “All you had to drink was one glass of brandy and a cup of coffee. So one or the other must have been drugged. Drugged, yes. The lights went out on me so suddenly. And Ardric sat at the table alone, after the brandy came, chatting away, while you carefully checked the board an
d never looked to see what he was doing."

  Why look? Ardric who saved Vinson's life, Ardric who appeared out of nowhere in the Nightbirds’ Quarter and helped so nobly in the trouble with the anti-Feds, and who just happened by the happiest chance to be a qualified Second Pilot so that they could reward him for saving Vinson's life by giving him Vinson's job. Why would Ardric drug the brandy and wreck the ship that was taking Morivenn to Vega? Ardric was all in favor of Federation.

  He said.

  And maybe that was the flint-hard thought he was thinking as he looked at the stars. Thinking of how all these people were going to die in order to keep Morivenn and keep Skereth out of the Federation. Because maybe the whole thing right from the time those two kids came up and brought us a drink in that joint in Skambar, and then talked us into going to the Nightbirds’ Quarter...

  The kids, and the men waiting for us there in a place where the people don't interfere with the affairs of humans, don't even call the police. They knocked me out and left me, but they dragged Vinson into an alley and smashed him up, and then Ardric came, and a few hours later he was Second Pilot of the Vega Queen.

  "Ardric!” he said harshly, aloud. “Ardric, Ardric!"

  Wasek turned his head. “What about Ardric?"

  "He...” said Horne, and was suddenly so choked with rage that he could not speak for a moment or two. “He drugged my brandy, he changed the course, he wrecked the Queen, nobody else could have..."

  Wasek had gone white. He belted Horne across the mouth so hard that the blood fountained where his teeth had cut the inside of his lips.

  Wasek said in a very quiet voice, “I wouldn't say that again, Horne. You really shouldn't, seeing the man died trying to cover for you."

  Between the rage and the pain and the frustration, Horne wanted very badly to kill Wasek but that was not practical and so he sat rigid with the blood running down onto his tunic and his eyes hot and furious, glaring at the captain.

  "I'll show you,” he said, and cursed Wasek.

  But the words were so blurred with the blood and the swelling of his lips that Wasek did not understand them.

  The lifeboat landed. Horne did not see much of what happened afterwards because men from Port Authority took him directly from the lifeboat to a closed van. They told him that this was for his own protection. Wasek had reported by radio as soon as the lifeboat was clear, and of course they had had the wreck on their radarscopes before that, and by now every spaceman around the port knew about how it had happened. Through a couple of tiny ventilator ports Horne could see that there was a large crowd and considerable activity, and he was just as glad to be in the van where they couldn't get at him, if they were so minded. They went out by a closed gate on the opposite side of the field and there was no trouble.

  Whether it was at that moment in the stuffy oil-and-metal smelling obscurity of the van, or whether it was later, in the shabby cheerlessness of the detention cell at PAHQ that Horne suddenly found himself a different man, he was never sure. There was so little to choose between the two places and the way he felt in them. The anger was the same, the shame, the degradation, the sick incredulity. I can no longer walk down a street, he thought. I can't go into a bar. I can't talk to another man. I always walked with my head up, and now I can't crawl low enough on my belly to get by.

  It would be bad enough if I deserved this. But I don't.

  The different man, the new Horne, said, “The bastards. I'll show them."

  It was difficult to remember just then that Wasek and the others were perfectly justified in their belief. There was in him only the raging hurt that men who knew him, who served alongside him, commanded him—that any of them, and especially Wasek, could think that he, Jim Horne, was capable of such an act.

  The thing that was different about this new Jim Horne was that there weren't any soft places in him anymore. No friendly welcomes for admiring kids buying drinks. No gratitude for her in time of need. And no desire to see the other fellow's point of view. A man willing to murder all or most of the passengers and crew of a large ship in order to advance a political cause must be a devout believer in that cause, but Horne was not interested.

  He wondered if Ardric were still alive.

  He had a feeling that he was. Another lifeboat might have gotten away without anyone knowing or seeing it in the awful confusion of the wreck. No one would ever be able to check the actual number of bodies, nor know whether all the boats were accounted for. Any that were missing might have been vaporized by impact or broken up into chunks of drift. A good pilot might have gotten well clear before the final blowout and hidden his small craft in the fringes of the meteor swarm, moving with it, thus evading radar watch. He might have come down in a remote spot, some private field where he could land secretly, or he might have been picked up in space by some ship waiting beyond radar range.

  He might be dead. Even if he had planned to get away, Ardric might be dead. You couldn't stage-manage a space-wreck with any great degree of certainty. If Ardric had indeed been in the pilot room when Wasek was trying to get him, Horne, there, then he was certainly dead. But why would he have been there? He had already called to Wasek for help, and disclosed Horne's condition, so if there were any survivors they would all know about it. Why would he wait around and take chances any longer?

  It might be just wishful thinking, to be so sure that Ardric had got away. But Horne had to have something to hang onto. Otherwise there would not be any hope, and a man had to have some hope in order to go on living.

  He needed that shred of hope very desperately when they gave him a preliminary hearing before the representative of the Federation Board of Inquiry. There were some local men present and a couple from the Pilots’ Association and the Space Officers’ Association. They listened while Wasek and several others testified as to what they had seen at the time of the wreck and later. They listened while Horne told his story of the two boys and the Nightbirds and the anti-Feds and the drugged brandy, and while he was talking he heard the way the words dropped like stones into cold water. And because the story sounded preposterous to the men who were listening, it began to sound so to Horne, and even his voice began to acquire a note of doubt.

  For he had no proof. Not a single small fragment of proof. He was, to be honest, only speculating on what Ardric had done, and to them Ardric was a hero who had died at his post. All he could know for sure was what he himself had not done ... namely, foul up the course and then get drunk.

  He would never have any proof if he did not find Ardric.

  The judgment of the Board representative was foregone. Horne was to be returned to Vega Center for trial according to the legal procedures of the Federation. And Horne knew what the outcome of that trial would be. Permanent loss of his ticket, a fine, imprisonment. They might just as well hang him and be done with it.

  Wasek did not even look at him as he went out.

  They took Horne back to the detention room and locked him in. He sat staring at the drab wall, thinking.

  Thinking that a dead man would be hard to find, but that finding one was his only chance...

  CHAPTER V

  IT WAS two days later before Horne made his move.

  It was a forlorn hope, and he knew it. But if he was ever to find Ardric and clear himself, he had to start doing it now, before they took him back to Vega. The detention room was tight and the man who guarded him was careful. He could see only one way. He sent Wasek a message. If you'll bring me what money's due me, he wrote, I'll confess to the Board now that I was derelict in duty.

  Horne was gambling on two things. One was that Wasek could not get another berth as captain until he was completely cleared of the Vega Queen disaster. A confession by Horne would clear him right away, and Horne thought he would come. The other thing was a little-known clause in the Space Code which he hoped his guard had never heard about.

  He had sent his message just before sunset, for it was essential that Wasek should come after dark.
He sat watching the bit of sky in the high loophole window turn from orange to pale yellow to dusk, and the velvety night of the planet came down, and nothing happened. He began to sweat. If Wasek didn't come until morning, or if he didn't come at all...

  Wasek came. The door was unlocked and opened and the guard let the visitor in, then closed and re-locked the door from the outside.

  Grim and bitter, Wasek shoved an envelope at him. “Here it is, your wages for the outward trip. Though what need you'll have of money where you're going, I couldn't say."

  "I'll need a lawyer, to work up a clemency plea,” Horne said sullenly, and took the envelope.

  "I've notified the Board you'll make a full confession,” Wasek said. “They'll hear you in the morning."

  Horne nodded. “But first there's one thing..."

  "What?"

  "This,” and Horne swung with all his strength.

  His fist caught Wasek on the jaw. The Captain staggered and slithered and Horne sprang forward and caught him with the solicitude of a lover, easing him down to the floor without a sound.

  Wasek was not knocked out but he was so near to it that it made no difference. His eyes were glazed and his hands fluttered vaguely, and a slurred whisper came from his mouth.

  Horne worked fast, taking Wasek's belt to tie his wrists behind his back, ripping a strip from his sleeve to make a gag that wouldn't choke the man to death. Then he fumbled frantically for the little pocket inside Wasek's jacket. The sweat sprang out on his forehead and his fingers were all thumbs, and for a moment he thought the thing wasn't there, but then he felt the flat, hard outline of it and in a moment held it out in his hand.

  There was a clause in the Space Code which said that the licensed master of a ship had the right and duty to possess and carry at all times a semi-lethal weapon. The clause had been put there in older and wilder days, for good reasons connected with some classic mutinies. Most masters these days complied with the regulation by carrying a miniaturized pocket-stunner they never used, and Horne had gambled that his guard didn't know this, and it seemed now he hadn't.