by Ben Bova
Talk about irony, Larry thought.
He was sitting in Dan’s desk chair in the Propulsion and Power control center, one level below the observatory. The gravity was still low enough for his arms to tend to float up off the chair arms. Someone was holding a vibrator to the back of his neck, soothing away the roaring headache that the stunner had given him.
Valery was standing in front of him, looking very pale and frightened.
Half a dozen engineers and technicians were at their stations. All of them wore stunners on their belts.
“How does your head feel now?” a girl’s voice came from behind him.
Too stiff and aching to turn toward her, he replied. “Like somebody’s running a rocket engine inside it.”
The girl moved in front of him, where he could see that she was wearing a white nurse’s coverall. “I’ll get you a pain-killer.” She opened a kit on the desk.
Larry looked up at Valery. “So you thought it was me.”
Her eyes were red from crying, he noticed.
UI was afraid it was you,” she answered quietly.
“Do you feel any better,” he asked bitterly, “knowing that it’s Dan?”
“Not much,” she confessed. Then she added, “But… I’m glad it wasn’t you. Even if you’d been doing it unconsciously.”
The nurse turned back to him and handed him an immense blue pill.
“I’ll get some water,” Valery said.
“Make it a bucketful,” Larry called to her. To the nurse, he asked, “Will this make me sleep?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s a selective depressant. If you want to sleep…”
“No, I’ve got to stay awake.”
Val came back with a plastic cup of water. Larry swallowed hard on the pill, nearly choked, but finally forced it down.
“Any idea of where Dan is?” he asked.
Val said, “No. Mort Campbell is heading up the emergency squad. They’re searching the ship for him.”
“Could you get Mort on the phone for me, please?”
She handled the desk phone, while Larry rubbed the back of his still stiff neck.
Campbell’s heavy-featured face showed up on the screen.
“Where are you?” Larry asked.
“Storage area seventeen. One of the maintenance men working on the extra shuttles said he heard some strange noises down here.”
“Anything?”
Campbell’s beefy face settled into a scowl. “Who knows? This area’s big enough to hide the whole ship’s crew. We’ve got kilometers of corridors and tubes to search, thousands of sections and compartments… a few dozen men can’t hack it. Not even a few hundred.”
“He’s got to be someplace. I’ll make sure that all the working and living areas are guarded. He’ll have to show up sooner or later… even if it’s just to get some food.”
“I know. But I wouldn’t count on that. Anyway, there are video monitors on all the important areas of the ship. I’ve got a special squad of people monitoring the viewscreens on the bridge.”
“Good.”
Campbell said, “I understand he’s armed.”
“He was. But I want him brought in alive. No rough stuff. If you have to fight, use the stunners.”
“He must really be sick.”
“And scared. Be careful with him. But don’t take unnecessary chances; he’s perfectly willing to kill.”
Campbell’s eyes flickered with just the barest hint of surprise. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said.
The picture on the viewscreen faded.
Larry got to his feet. For a moment he felt a surge of dizziness. Val was beside him and he rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “We can be in better touch with the whole ship down on the bridge.”
“Wait a minute?” she asked. “I had an idea, while you were talking with Mr. Campbell.”
“What?”
“Dr. Hsai. He’s spent a lot of time examining Dan, talking with him …”
“And finding zero,” Larry grumbled.
“Yes, but he might be able to find something in his records… or maybe something he’ll remember… some clue to where Dan might be hiding, what he’s doing.”
Larry thought it over for half a moment. “It’s worth a try.” He turned to the nearest technician, who was seated at a monitoring console, watching the computer-produced graphs that gave second-by-second reports on the performance of the reactors and generators. “Your name’s Peterson, isn’t it?”
The blond youth smiled, obviously flattered that the Chairman knew his name. “Yessir, that’s right.”
“Would you please call Dr. Hsai and ask him to meet me on the bridge as soon as he can possibly get there?”
“Yessir. Right away.”
The oriental psychotech was already on the bridge, waiting patiently, when Larry and Val got there. All the way down the now fully lit connector tubes, padding down those spiraling metal steps, Larry had half-expected Dan to leap out at them. No sign of him. Nor of Campbell’s search parties and emergency squad.
It’s a big ship. Larry reminded himself. You could roam around for weeks without seeing another person, if you really wanted to.
All the technicians on the bridge were wearing sidearms as they sat at their consoles. And there were two grim-faced guards scowling at the door Larry and Val stepped through.
Dr. Hsai was unarmed, of course. Larry quickly explained what he was after.
The psychotech pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I must admit that nothing comes to mind right now. But I will review all my records. Perhaps there is something he inadvertently revealed that will help you.”
There’d better be, Larry thought. To Val, he muttered,“Dan could do a lot of damage to the ship, if he wants to.”
“But all the vital areas are protected now, aren’t they?”
He scanned the viewscreens and nodded. “They seem to be… but the ship’s too big. Too many soft spots. He could cut electrical connections, air lines, water pipes… anything.”
“Why would he do something like that?” she asked.
“How should I know?” Larry snapped. “Why would he do any of the things he’s doing? He’s crazy!”
She didn’t respond, but her chin dropped slightly.
“I’m sorry,” Larry said immediately. “I didn’t mean it that way. Guess I’m getting edgy.”
“I know,” Valery said.
The hours wore on. Larry finally had to sleep; he couldn’t stay on his feet any longer. He woke up two hours later and groggily made his way back to the bridge.
Mort Campbell was there, unshaven, bleary-eyed, sipping coffee from a steaming mug.
“Anything?” Larry asked.
“Nine dozen false alarms, that’s all.” Campbell sipped, then winced. “Cheez, that’s hot! No…everybody and his brother thinks they’ve seen him. But none of it checks out. Wherever he’s hiding, it’s a good place.”
Larry stood through two full shifts. Most of the time he remained on the bridge, although he put in a swing with one of Campbell’s search squads, spending several hours going through corridors and unused work and storage areas. All of them were sealed tight and lay under half a century’s worth of dust.
He had dinner with Val in the cafeteria.
“I’m going to assign a couple of men to guard you.”
“Me?”
“He was after you, wasn’t he?”
“That’s only because I showed him that Epsilon Indi’s closest planet is almost exactly like Earth. He wanted to destroy that evidence, to make sure we stayed here.”
“Oh… Now he knows you were lying to him.”
She grinned, a bit sheepishly. “No, I was telling him the truth. It was you that I lied to.”
“What? But you said …”
“It was a lie,” she replied. “To see if… well, if you were the one who’d try to… stop me from reporting to the Council.”
Larry
stared at her. “You mean there really is a planet like Earth at Epsilon Indi?”
She nodded, grinning again.
“That’s fantastic! Fabulous!” Larry felt like jumping up on the cafeteria table. Then he remembered about Dan. “But I still want you guarded. He’s dangerous, and he might come after you. I don’t want you to be bait anymore.”
“I’ll be all right in my own quarters. Mother’s there, and we have a phone___”
“And there will be two guards with you at all times,” Larry said firmly.
“At all times?” Her eyebrows arched coyly.
Larry put on a sour face. “They’ll stay outside your door when you go home.”
“But…”
“No arguments, or I’ll make it four guards.”
She put her hands up in mock surrender. “Yessir, Mr. Chairman. To hear is to obey.”
“Stuff it.” Now he was grinning. “Uh… this might not be the right time, but—well, I still love you.”
“I know,” she said, much more softly. “I never stopped loving you.”
He leaned across the table and kissed her. Seven dozen people in the cafeteria stopped their meals to watch, but Larry couldn’t have cared less. Even if he had noticed them.
“He’s got to be someplace” Larry fumed.
He was on the bridge again, talking to Mort Campbell, who was slumped tiredly on the chair of an unoccupied console.
“A man just can’t disappear for three days,” Larry insisted. “It’s a big ship, but you should have been able to flush him out by now.”
“I know, I feel the same way,” Campbell said, nodding his heavy head. “Either he’s damned clever or…”
“Or what?”
“Or he’s got friends helping him.”
Larry made a chopping motion with his hand. “No. That I can’t believe. A madman aboard the ship is one thing, but other madmen to help him? No.”
“He got Joe Haller to take his place on the shuttle, didn’t he?”
“We’ve gone through all that with Joe. He had no idea of what Dan was up to. Dan asked him to fill in for him, and he did. That’s all.”
Campbell threw his hands up in disgust. “Then where the hell is he? Why can’t we find him?”
“If I knew, Mort, I’d…”
“Emergency signal!” sang out one of the techs.
Larry went over to her like a shot. “What is it?”
The girl pointed to a flashing red light on the console in front of her, between two viewscreens. Her hands flew over the keyboard. One of the viewscreens brightened and showed a guard, bleeding from a gushing cut on his scalp. The blood was pouring down into his eyes.
“He…he’s here…”
“What’s the location?” Larry yelled at the girl.
“Airlock fourteen, level three.”
Campbell bolted from his chair and dashed for the nearest door.
Larry snapped, “Hook me into the intercom.”
The girl nodded and did things to her keyboard. “Okay now, sir.”
Leaning over her shoulder to speak into the microphone built into the console’s face, Larry said. “This is the Chairman speaking. Dan Christopher has attacked a guard at airlock
fourteen, level three. All search squads converge on that location. All guard units, remain on duty at your assigned posts.” He started to straighten up, then had another thought. “Dan… Dan Christopher. Give up, Dan. You can’t win. We want to help you. Give up and you won’t be hurt.”
But it sounded empty, even as he said it.
Larry fidgeted on the bridge for about a minute longer, then said, “I’m going up to that airlock. Relay any calls for me to that location.”
He got there as the guard was being carried off to the infirmary on a stretcher. Campbell was standing inside the airlock, filling its cramped metal space with his formidable bulk. He had his hands on his hips.
Larry pushed past a dozen men and stepped through the airlock’s inner hatch to squeeze in next to Campbell.
“Well, now we know where he is,” Campbell said.
“What happened?”
Campbell jerked a thumb at the rack of pressure suits hanging outside the airlock, in the corridor. “He slugged the guard, took one of the suits, and went outside.”
“What? You’re sure?”
Nodding, Campbell answered, “Yep. Just checking the hatch here. It was open when we arrived a few minutes ago.”
“He’s outside?”
“He’s committing suicide.”
Larry thought it over for a few moments. “No. He’s moving to a part of the ship where he wants to be… My god! He can cut open bulkheads anywhere he wants to and blow whole sections of the ship into vacuum. If he does that in the living quarters…”
Even Campbell’s normal calm seemed shaken. “We’d better get all the living quarters on disaster alert. All hatches sealed…”
Larry nodded. “And guards on every airlock.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“Yes. Get a squad of volunteers together. We’ve got to go outside after him. And I’m going with you.”
(16)
It was a strange, eerie feeling.
Larry had been outside the ship before, but never since they had taken up orbit around the planet. Its massive curving bulk hung over him, it seemed, close and beckoning yet somehow menacing. He felt almost as if it was going to fall on him and crush him.
He shook his head inside the suit’s helmet. You’ve got a job to do. No time for sightseeing.
A dozen men had floated o.ut of the airlock in search of Dan. A dozen men to cover the thousands of possible places where he might be lurking.
They worked with a plan in mind. They came out of one airlock at the first level, the largest of the ship’s seven wheels. They spread out around the periphery of that wheel. The plan was for each man to search the area between connecting tubes. Then, if none of them found Dan, they would work’their way simultaneously up each of the connector tubes to the next ring, search there, then on to the third ring. And so on, right up to the hub.
We could use a hundred men, Larry thought. Only twelve men qualified for outside work had volunteered. Most of the people aboard the ship had never been outside it.
Larry watched the man nearest him disappear over the curve of the ship’s ring-like structure. He was alone now, standing on the ring’s metal skin with magnetically gripping boots, looking down a connector tube, past the seven rings to the bulging plastiglass blisters of the. hub.
The stars formed a solemn, unblinking backdrop, like millions of eyes watching him. And behind him, Larry could feel rather than see the immense ponderous presence of the planet.
Campbell’s voice crackled in his earphones. “Everbody ready?”
One by one, the eleven others answered by the numbers that had been hastily sprayed onto their suits.
“All right, everybody work to his left. Keep your guns loose.”
Larry fingered the laser tool-turned-weapon at his waist. Sonic stunners wouldn’t work in vacuum. If there was any shooting, somebody was going to die.
He began walking in a spiral around the big main wheel, his footsteps tacky in the magnetic boots. Around and around, spiraling like an electron in a strong magnetic field, curving from one connector tube to the next. There was practically no place for a man to hide here; the main level’s outer wall was almost perfectly smooth, broken only by an occasional viewport.
Larry carefully avoided stepping on the viewports. Being plastiglass, they’d provide no grip for his magnetic boots. Larry didn’t feel like slipping off the ship’s surface. There were steering jets on his belt, but he preferred to stay in contact with the ship rather than try zooming through empty space.
At last he came to the next connector tube. He found that he was breathing hard, sweating, but feeling relieved. No sign of Dan. And that somehow made him almost happy.
At least I didn’t have to shoot it out with him.
The others began reporting in. None of them had seen Dan.
“All right,” Campbell said. “Every man goes along the tube he’s at now. Stop at level two-and report in.”
It was taking too long, Larry realized. More than an hour had passed since they had first come outside. It would easily take another hour or more by the time they had checked out level two. It wasn’t going to work. They’d have to go inside long before they could inspect level three. If Dan didn’t show up soon, they’d have to call off the whole idea of searching outside for him. Unless they could get more people outside to help.
Larry always felt hot inside the suits. There was a radiator on the back of his lifepack, but it never seemed to get rid of his body heat fast enough. The air blowers whirred noisily, but he still found himself drenched with sweat before he was halfway up the tube to level two.
Around and around. Down was up, and then it was down again. He saw the planet swing by as he stolidly plodded along the metal skin of the tube. Stars and planets, turning, turning, turning Keep your eyes searching for Dan! he warned himself. But where? He could be crouched behind that antenna; Larry checked it out carefully. No. He could be hovering no more than a hundred meters from the ship, and he’d be virtually invisible against the backdrop of stars. We’d never see him…you’d have to be lucky enough to look in exactly the right place at the right time…
And then Larry began to get the uncanny feeling that Dan was walking along behind him, following his footsteps, tiptoeing the way children sometimes do behind someone they’re trying to surprise.
He knew it was silly, irrational. But the feeling grew. He felt a cold shudder go through him. If he is behind me…
Larry whirled around. It was a clumsy move in the pressure suit, and his boots left contact with the ship. No one! Then he realized he was drifting away. He slapped at the control unit on his belt, and the microjets puffed briefly and slammed him hard back onto the tube. His knees buckled momentarily, but he stayed erect.
You’re getting spooked, he raged at himself.
He glanced at the oxygen gauge on his wrist. Still in the green, but a sliver of yellow was showing. When the yellow went to red, he’d have to either go inside or get a fresh tank.