HILIFTER
It was locked—from the outside.
Not only that, but the mechanical latch handle that would override the button lock on the tiny tourist cabin aboard the Star of the North was hidden by the very bed on which Cully When sat cross-legged, like some sinewy mountain man out of Cully’s own pioneering ancestry. Cully grinned at the image in the mirror which went with the washstand now hidden by the bed beneath him. He would not have risked such an expression as that grin if there had been anyone around to see him. The grin, he knew, gave too much of him away to viewers. It was the hard, unconquerable humor of a man dealing for high stakes.
Here, in the privacy of this locked cabin, it was also a tribute to the skill of the steward who had imprisoned him. A dour and cautious individual with a long Scottish face, and no doubt the greater part of his back wages reinvested in the very spaceship line he worked for. Or had Cully done something to give himself away? No. Cully shook his head. If that had been the case, the steward would have done more than just lock the cabin. It occurred to Cully that his face, at last, might be becoming known.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the steward had said, as he opened the cabin’s sliding door and saw the unmade bed. “Off-watch steward’s missed making it up.” He clucked reprovingly. “I’ll fix it for you, sir.”
“No hurry,” said Cully. “I just want to hang my clothes; and I can do that later.”
“Oh, no, sir.” The lean, dour face of the other—as primitive in a different way as Cully’s own—looked shocked. “Regulations. Passengers’ gear to be stowed and bunk made up before overdrive.”
“Well, I can’t just stand here in the corridor,” said Cully. “I want to get rid of the stuff and get a drink.” And indeed the corridor was so narrow, they were like two vehicles on a mountain road. One would have to back up to some wider spot to let the other past.
“Have the sheets in a moment, sir,” said the steward. “Just a moment, sir. If you wouldn’t mind sitting up on the bed, sir?”
“All right,” said Cully. “But hurry. I want to step up for a drink in the lounge.”
He hopped up on to the bed, which filled the little cabin in its down position; and drew his legs up tailor-fashion to clear them out of the corridor.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the steward, closed the door, and went off. As soon as he heard the button lock latch, Cully had realized what the man was up to. But an unsuspecting man would have waited at least several minutes before hammering on the locked door and calling for someone to let him out. Cully had been forced to sit digesting the matter in silence.
At the thought of it now, however, he grinned again. That steward was a regular prize package. Cully must remember to think up something appropriate for him, afterwards. At the moment, there were more pressing things to think of.
Cully looked in the mirror again and was relieved at the sight of himself without the betraying grin. The face that looked back at him at the moment was lean and angular. A little peroxide solution on his thick, straight brows, had taken the sharp appearance off his high cheekbones and given his pale blue eyes a faintly innocent expression. When he really wanted to fail to impress sharply discerning eyes, he also made it a point to chew gum.
The present situation, he considered now, did not call for that extra touch. If the steward was already even vaguely suspicious of him, he could not wait around for an ideal opportunity. He would have to get busy now, while they were still working the spaceship out of the solar system to a safe distance where the overdrive could be engaged without risking a mass-proximity explosion.
And this, since he was imprisoned so neatly in his own shoebox of a cabin, promised to be a problem right from the start.
He looked around the cabin. Unlike the salon cabins on the level overhead, where it was possible to pull down the bed and still have a tiny space to stand upright in—either beside the bed, in the case of single-bed cabins, or between them, in the case of doubles—in the tourist cabins once the bed was down, the room was completely divided into two spaces—the space above the bed and the space below. In the space above, with him, were the light and temperature and ventilation controls, controls to provide him with soft music or the latest adventure tape, food and drink dispensers and a host of other minor comforts.
There were also a phone and a signal button, both connected with the steward’s office. Thoughtfully he tried both. There was, of course, no answer.
At that moment a red light flashed on the wall opposite him; and a voice came out of the grille that usually provided the soft music.
“We are about to maneuver. This is the Captain’s Section, speaking. We are about to maneuver. Will all lounge passengers return to their cabins? Will all passengers remain in their cabins, and fasten seat belts. We are about to maneuver. This is the Captain’s Section—”
Cully stopped listening. The steward would have known this announcement was coming. It meant that everybody but crew members would be in their cabins and crew members would be up top in control level at maneuver posts. And that meant nobody was likely to happen along to let Cully out. If Cully could get out of this cabin, however, those abandoned corridors could be a break for him.
However, as he looked about him now, Cully was rapidly revising downward his first cheerful assumption that he— who had gotten out of so many much more intentional prisons —would find this a relatively easy task. On the same principle that a pit with unclimbable walls and too deep to jump up from and catch an edge is one of the most perfect traps designate—the tourist room held Cully. He was on top of the bed; and he needed to be below it to operate the latch handle.
First question: How impenetrable was the bed itself? Cully dug down through the covers, pried up the mattress, peered through the springs, and saw a blank panel of metal. Well, he had not really expected much in that direction. He put the mattress and covers back and examined what he had to work with above-bed.
There were all the control switches and buttons on the wall, but nothing among them promised him any aid. The walls were the same metal paneling as the base of the bed. Cully began to turn out his pockets in the hope of finding something in them that would inspire him. And he did indeed turn out a number of interesting items, including a folded piece of notepaper which he looked at rather soberly before laying it aside, unfolded, with a boy scout type of knife that just happened to have a set of lock picks among its other tools. The note would only take up valuable time at the moment, and—the lock being out of reach in the door— the lock picks were no good either.
There was nothing in what he produced to inspire him, however. Whistling a little mournfully, he began to make the next best use of his pile of property. He unscrewed the nib and cap of his long, gold fountain pen, took out the ink cartridge and laid the tube remaining aside. He removed his belt, and the buckle from the belt. The buckle, it appeared, clipped on to the fountain pen tube in somewhat the manner of a pistol grip. He reached in his mouth, removed a bridge covering from the second premolar to the second molar, and combined this with a small metal throwaway dispenser of the sort designed to contain antacid tablets. The two together had a remarkable resemblance to the magazine and miniaturized trigger assembly of a small handgun; and when he attached them to the buckle-fountain-pen-tube combination the resemblance became so marked as to be practically in-arguable.
Cully made a few adjustments in this and looked around himself again. For the second time, his eye came to rest on the folded note, and, frowning at himself in the mirror, he did pick it up and unfold it. Inside it read: “O wae the pow’r the Giftie gie us” Love, Lucy. Well, thought Cully, that was about what you could expect from a starry-eyed girl with Scottish ancestors, and romantic notions about present-day conditions on Alderbaran IV and the other new worlds.
“. . . But if you have all that land on Asterope IV, why aren’t you back there developing it?” she had asked him.
“The New Worlds are stifling to death,” he had answered. But he
saw then she did not believe him. To her, the New Worlds were still the romantic Frontier, as the Old Worlds Confederation newspapers capitalized it. She thought he had given up from lack of vision.
“You should try again . . .” she murmured. He gave up trying to make her understand. And then, when the cruise was over and their shipboard acquaintance—that was all it was, really—ended on the Miami dock, he had felt her slip something in his pocket so lightly only someone as self-trained as he would have noticed it. Later he had found it to be this note—which he had kept now for too long.
He started to throw it away, changed his mind for the sixtieth time and put it back in his pocket. He turned back to the problem of getting out of the cabin. He looked it over, pulled a sheet from the bed and used its length to measure a few distances.
The bunk was pivoted near the point where the head of it entered the recess in the wall that concealed it in Up position. Up, the bunk was designed to fit with its foot next to the ceiling. Consequently, coming up, the foot would describe an arc—
About a second and a half later he had discovered that the arc of the foot, ascending, would leave just enough space in the opposite top angle between wall and ceiling so that if he could just manage to hang there, while releasing the safety latch at the foot of the bed, he might be able to get the bed up past him into the wall recess.
It was something which required the muscle and skill normally called for by so-called “chimney ascents” in mountain climbing—where the climber wedges himself between two opposing walls of rock. A rather wide chimney—since the room was a little more than four feet in width. But Cully had had some little experience in that line.
He tried it. A few seconds later, pressed against walls and ceiling, he reached down, managed to get the bed released, and had the satisfaction of seeing it fold up by him. Half a breath later he was free, out in the corridor of the Tourist Section.
The corridor was deserted and silent. All doors were closed. Cully closed his own thoughtfully behind him and went along the corridor to the more open space in the center of the ship. He looked up a steel ladder to the entrance of the Salon Section, where there would be another ladder to the Crew Section, and from there eventually to his objective—the Control level and the Captain’s Section. Had the way up those ladders been open, it would have been simple. But level with the top of the ladder he saw the way to the Salon section was closed off by a metal cover capable of withstanding fifteen pounds per square inch of pressure.
It had been closed, of course, as the other covers would have been, at the beginning of the maneuver period.
Cully considered it thoughtfully, his fingers caressing the pistol grip of the little handgun he had just put together. He would have preferred, naturally, that the covers be open and the way available to him without the need for fuss or muss. But the steward had effectively ruled out that possibility by reacting as and when he had. Cully turned away from the staircase, and frowned, picturing the layout of the ship, as he had committed it to memory five days ago.
There was an emergency hatch leading through the ceiling of the end tourist cabin to the end salon cabin overhead, at both extremes of the corridor. He turned and went down to the end cabin nearest him, and laid his finger quietly on the outside latch-handle.
There was no sound from inside. He drew his put-together handgun from his belt; and, holding it in his left hand, calmly and without hesitation, opened the door and stepped inside.
He stopped abruptly. The bed in here was, of course, up in the wall, or he could never have entered. But the cabin’s single occupant was asleep on the right-hand seat of the two seats that an upraised bed left exposed. The occupant was a small girl of about eight years old.
The slim golden barrel of the handgun had swung immediately to aim at the child’s temple. For an automatic second, it hung poised there, Cully’s finger half-pressing the trigger. But the little girl never stirred. In the silence, Cully heard the surge of his own blood in his ears and the faint crackle of the note in his shirt pocket. He lowered the gun and fumbled in the waistband of his pants, coming up with a child-sized anesthetic pellet. He slipped this into his gun above the regular load; aimed the gun, and fired. The child made a little uneasy movement all at once; and then lay still. Cully bent over her for a second, and heard the soft sound of her breathing. He straightened up. The pellet worked not through the blood stream, but immediately through a reaction of the nerves. In fifteen minutes the effect would be worn off, and the girl’s sleep would be natural slumber again.
He turned away, stepped up on the opposite seat and laid his free hand on the latch handle of the emergency hatch overhead. A murmur of voices from above made him hesitate. He unscrewed the barrel of the handgun and put it in his ear with the other hollow end resting against the ceiling which was also the floor overhead. The voices came, faint and distorted, but understandable to his listening.
“. . . Hilifter,” a female voice was saying.
“Oh, Patty!” another female voice answered. “He was just trying to scare you. You believe everything.”
“How about that ship that got hilifted just six months ago? That ship going to one of the Pleiades, just like this one? The Queen of Argyle—”
“Princess of Argyle ”
“Well, you know what I mean. Ships do get hilifted. Just as long as there’re governments on the pioneer worlds that’ll license them and no questions asked. And it could just as well happen to this ship. But you don’t worry about it a bit.”
“No, I don’t.”
“When hilifters take over a ship, they kill off everyone who can testify against them. None of the passengers or ship’s officers from the Princess of Argyle was ever heard of again.”
“Says who?”
“Oh, everybody knows that!”
Cully took the barrel from his ear and screwed it back onto his weapon. He glanced at the anesthetized child and thought of trying the other cabin with an emergency hatch. But the maneuver period would not last more than twenty minutes at the most and five of that must be gone already. He put the handgun between his teeth, jerked the latch to the overhead hatch, and pulled it down and open.
He put both hands on the edge of the hatch opening; and with one spring went upward into the salon cabin overhead.
He erupted into the open space between a pair of facing seats, each of which held a girl in her twenties. The one on his left was a rather plump, short, blond girl who was sitting curled up on her particular seat with a towel across her knees, an open bottle of pink nail polish on the towel, and the brush-cap to the bottle poised in her hand. The other was a tall, dark-haired, very pretty lass with a lap-desk pulled down from the wall and a handscriber on the desk where she was apparently writing a letter. For a moment both stared at him, and his gun; and then the blonde gave a muffled shriek, pulled the towel over her head and lay still, while the brunette, staring at Cully, went slowly pale.
“Jim!” she said.
“Sorry,” said Cully. “The real name’s Cully When. Sorry about this, too, Lucy.” He held the gun casually, but it was pointed in her general direction. “I didn’t have any choice.” A little of the color came back. Her eyes were as still as fragments of green bottle glass.
“No choice about what?” she said.
“To come through this way,” said Cully. “Believe me, if I’d known you were here, I’d have picked any other way. But there wasn’t any other way; and I didn’t know.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at the gun in his hand. “Do you have to point that at me?”
“I’m afraid,” said Cully, gently, “I do.”
She did not smile.
“I’d still like to know what you’re doing here,” she said. “I’m just passing through,” said Cully. He gestured with the gun to the emergency hatch to the Crew Section, overhead. “As I say, I’m sorry it has to be through your cabin. But I didn’t even know you were serious about emigrating.” “People usually judge other
people by themselves,” she said expressionlessly. “As it happened, I believed you.” She looked at the gun again. “How many of you are there on board?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” said Cully.
“No. You couldn’t, could you?” Her eyes held steady on him. “You know, there’s an old poem about a man like you. He rides by a farm maiden and she falls in love with him, just like that. But he makes her guess what he is; and she guesses ... oh, all sorts of honorable things, like soldier, or forester. But he tells her in the end he’s just an outlaw, slinking through the wood.”
Cully winced.
“Lucy—” he said. “Lucy—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I should have known when you didn’t call me or get in touch with me, after the boat docked.” She glanced over at her friend, motionless under the towel. “You have the gun. What do you want us to do?”
“Just sit still,” he said. “I’ll go on up through here and be out of your way in a second. I’m afraid—” he reached over to the phone on the wall and pulled its cord loose. “You can buzz for the steward, still, after I’m gone,” he said. “But he won’t answer just a buzzer until after the maneuver period’s over. And the stairway hatches are locked. Just sit tight and you’ll be all right.”
He tossed the phone aside and tucked the gun in the waistband.
“Excuse me,” he said, stepping up on the seat beside her. She moved stiffly away from him. He unlatched the hatch overhead, pulled it down; and went up through it. When he glanced back down through it, he saw her face stiffly upturned to him.
He turned away and found himself in an equipment room. It was what he had expected from the ship’s plans he had memorized before coming aboard. He went quickly out of the room and scouted the Section.
As he had expected, there was no one at all upon this level. Weight and space on interstellar liners being at the premium that they were, even a steward like the one who had locked him in his cabin did double duty. In overdrive, no one but the navigating officer had to do much of anything. But in ordinary operation, there were posts for all ships personnel, and all ships personnel were at them up in the Captain’s Section at Control.
The Star Road Page 3