The stair hatch to this top and final section of the ship, he found to be closed as the rest. This, of course, was routine. He had not expected this to be unlocked, though a few years back ships like this might have been that careless. There were emergency hatches from this level as well, of course, up to the final section. But it was no part of Cully’s plan to come up in the middle of a Control room or a Captain’s Section filled with young, active, and almost certainly armed officers. The inside route was closed.
The outside route remained a possibility. Cully went down to the opposite end of the corridor and found the entry port closed, but sealed only by a standard lock. In an adjoining room there were outside suits. Cully spent a few minutes with his picks, breaking the lock of the seal; and then went in to put on the suit that came closest to fitting his six-foot-two frame.
A minute later he stepped out onto the outside skin of the ship.
As he watched the outer door of the entry port closing ponderously in the silence of airless space behind him, he felt the usual inner coldness that came over him at times like this. He had a mild but very definite phobia about open space with its myriads of unchanging stars. He knew what caused it—several psychiatrists had told him it was nothing to worry about, but he could not quite accept their unconcern. He knew he was a very lonely individual, underneath it all; and subconsciously he guessed he equated space with the final extinction in which he expected one day to disappear and be forgotten forever. He could not really believe it was possible for someone like him to make a dent in such a universe.
It was symptomatic, he thought now, plodding along with the magnetic bootsoles of his suit clinging to the metal hull, that he had never had any success with women—like Lucy. A sort of bad luck seemed to put him always in the wrong position with anyone he stood a chance of loving. Inwardly, he was just as starry-eyed as Lucy, he admitted to himself, alone with the vastness of space and the stars, but he’d never had much success bringing it out into the open. Where she went all right, he seemed to go all wrong. Well, he thought, that was life. She went her way and he would go his. And it was probably a good thing.
He looked ahead up the side of the ship, and saw the slight bulge of the observation window of the navigator’s section. It was just a few more steps now.
Modern ships were sound insulated, thankfully, or the crew inside would have heard his dragging footsteps on the hull. He reached the window and peered in. The room he looked into was empty.
Beside the window was a small, emergency port for cleaning and repairs of the window. Clumsily, and with a good deal of effort, he got the lock-bolt holding it down, unscrewed, and let himself in. The space between outer and inner ports here was just enough to contain a spacesuited man. He crouched in darkness after the outer port had closed behind him.
Incoming air screamed up to audibility. He cautiously cracked the interior door and looked into a room still empty of any crew members. He slipped inside and snapped the lock on the door before getting out of his suit.
As soon as he was out, he drew the handgun from his belt and cautiously opened the door he had previously locked. He looked out on a short corridor leading one way to the Control Room, and the other, if his memory of the memorized ship plans had not failed him, to the central room above the stairway hatch from below. Opening off this small circular space surrounding the hatch, would be another entrance directly to the Control Room, a door to the Captain’s Quarters, and one to the Communications Room.
The corridor was deserted. He heard voices coming down it from the Control Room; and he slipped out the door that led instead to the space surrounding the stairway hatch. And checked abruptly.
The hatch was open. And it had not been open when he had checked it from the level below, ten minutes before.
For the first time he cocked an ear specifically to the kinds of voices coming from the Control Room. The acoustics of this part of the ship mangled all sense out of the words being said. But now that he listened, he had no trouble recognizing, among others, the voice of Lucy.
It occurred to him then with a kind of wonder at himself, that it would have been no feat for an active girl like herself to have followed him up through the open emergency hatch, and later mount the crew level stairs to the closed hatch there and pound on it until someone opened up.
He threw aside further caution and sprinted across to the doorway of the Captain’s Quarters. The door was unlocked. He ducked inside and looked around him. It was empty. It occurred to him that Lucy and the rest of the ship’s complement would probably still be expecting him to be below in the Crew’s section. He closed the door and looked about him, at the room he was in.
The room was more lounge than anything else, being the place where the captain of a spaceship did his entertaining. But there was a large and businesslike desk in one corner of the room, and in the wall opposite, was a locked, glassed-in case holding an assortment of rifles and handguns.
He was across the room in a moment and in a few, savage, seconds, had the lock to the case picked open. He reached in and took down a short-barreled, flaring-muzzled riot gun. He checked the chamber. It was filled with a full thousand-clip of the deadly steel darts. Holding this in one hand and his handgun in the other, he went back out the door and toward the other entrance to the control room—the entrance from the central room around the stairway hatch.
“. . . He wouldn’t tell me if there were any others,” Lucy was saying to a man in a captain’s shoulder tabs, while eight other men, including the dour-faced steward who had locked Cully in his cabin, stood at their posts, but listening.
“There aren’t any,” said Cully, harshly. They all turned to him. He laid the handgun aside on a control table by the entrance to free his other hand, and lifted the heavy riot gun in both hands, covering them. “There’s only me.”
“What do you want?” said the man with the captain’s tabs. His face was set, and a little pale. Cully ignored the question. He came into the room, circling to his right, so as to have a wall at his back.
“You’re one man short,” said Cully as he moved. “Where is he?”
“Off-shift steward’s sleeping,” said the steward who had locked Cully in his room.
“Move back,” said Cully, picking up crew members from their stations at control boards around the room, and herding them before him back around the room’s circular limit to the very entrance by which he had come in. “I don’t believe you.”
“Then I might as well tell you,” said the captain, backing up now along with Lucy and the rest. “He’s in Communications. We keep a steady contact with Solar Police right up until we go into overdrive. There are two of their ships pacing alongside us right now, lights off, a hundred miles each side of us.”
“Tell me another,” said Cully. “I don’t believe that either.” He was watching everybody in the room, but what he was most aware of were the eyes of Lucy, wide upon him. He spoke to her, harshly. “Why did you get into this?”
She was pale to the lips; and her eyes had a stunned look.
“I looked down and saw what you’d done to that child in the cabin below—” her voice broke off into a whisper. “Oh, Cully-”
He laughed mournfully.
“Stop there,” he ordered. He had driven them back into a corner near the entrance he had come in. “I’ve got to have all of you together. Now, one of you is going to tell me where that other man is—and I’m going to pick you off, one at a time until somebody does.”
“You’re a fool,” said the captain. A little of his color had come back. “You’re all alone. You don’t have a chance of controlling this ship by yourself. You know what happens to Hilifters, don’t you? It’s not just a prison sentence. Give up now and we’ll all put in a word for you. You might get off without mandatory execution.”
“No thanks,” said Cully. He gestured with the end of the riot gun. “We’re going into overdrive. Start setting up the course as I give it to you.”
; “No,” said the captain, looking hard at him.
“You’re a brave man,” said Cully. “But I’d like to point out something. I’m going to shoot you if you won’t co-operate; and then I’m going to work down the line of your officers. Sooner or later somebody’s going to preserve his life by doing what I tell him. So getting yourself killed isn’t going to save the ship at all. It just means somebody with less courage than you lives. And you die.”
There was a sharp, bitter intake of breath from the direction of Lucy. Cully kept his eyes on the captain.
“How about it?” Cully asked.
“No brush-pants of a colonial,” said the captain, slowly and deliberately, “is going to stand in my Control Room and tell me where to take my ship.”
“Did the captain and officers of the Princess of Argyle ever come back?” said Cully, somewhat cryptically.
“It’s nothing to me whether they came or stayed.”
“I take it all back,” said Cully. “You’re too valuable to lose.” The riot gun shifted to come to bear on the First Officer, a tall, thin, younger man whose hair was already receding at the temples. “But you aren’t, friend. I’m not even going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m just going to start counting; and when I decide to stop you’ve had it. One . . . two . .
“Don’t! Don’t shoot!” The First Officer jumped across the few steps that separated him from the Main Computer Panel. “What’s your course? What do you want me to set up—”
The captain began to curse the First Officer. He spoke slowly and distinctly and in a manner that completely ignored the presence of Lucy in the Control Room. He went right on as Cully gave the First Officer the course and the First Officer set it up. He stopped only, as—abruptly—the lights went out, and the ship overdrove.
When the lights came on again—it was a matter of only a fraction of a second of real time—the captain was at last silent. He seemed to have sagged in the brief interval of darkness and his face looked older.
And then, slamming through the tense silence of the room came the sound of the Contact Alarm Bell.
“Turn it on,” said Cully. The First Officer stepped over and pushed a button below the room’s communication screen. It cleared suddenly to show a man in a white jacket.
“We’re alongside, Cully,” he said. “We’ll take over now. How’re you fixed for casualties?”
, “At the moment—” began Cully. But he got no further than that. Behind him, three hard, spaced words in a man’s voice cut him off.
“Drop it, Hilifter!”
Cully did not move. He cocked his eyebrows a little sadly and grinned his untamable grin for the first time at the ship’s officers, and Lucy and the figure in the screen. Then the grin went away.
“Friend,” he said to the man hidden behind him. “Your business is running a spaceship. Mine is taking them away from people who run them. Right now you’re figuring how you make me give up or shoot me down and this ship dodges back into overdrive, and you become a hero for saving it. But it isn’t going to work that way.”
He waited for a moment to hear if the off-watch steward behind him—or whoever the officer was—would answer. But there was only silence.
“You’re behind me,” said Cully. “But I can turn pretty fast. You may get me coming around, but unless you’ve got something like a small cannon, you’re not going to stop me getting you at this short range, whether you’ve got me or not. Now, if you think I’m just talking, you better think again. For me, this is one of the risks of the trade.”
He turned. As he did so he went for the floor; and heard the first shot go by his ear. As he hit the floor another shot hit the deck beside him and ricocheted into his side. But by that time he had the heavy riot gun aimed and he pressed the firing button. The stream of darts knocked the man backward out of the entrance to the control room to lie, a still and huddled shape, in the corridor outside.
Cully got to his feet, feeling the single dart in his side. The room was beginning to waver around him, but he felt that he could hold on for the necessary couple of minutes before the people from the ship moving in alongside could breach the lock and come aboard. His jacket was loose and would hide the bleeding underneath. None of those facing him could know he had been hit.
“All right, folks,” he said, managing a grin. “It’s all over but the shouting—” And then Lucy broke suddenly from the group and went running across the room toward the entrance through which Cully had come a moment or so earlier.
“Lucy—” he barked at her. And then he saw her stop and turn by the control table near the entrance, snatching up the little handgun he had left there. “Lucy, do you want to get shot?”
But she was bringing up the little handgun, held in the grip of both her hands and aiming it squarely at him. The tears were running down her face.
“It’s better for you, Cully—” she was sobbing. “Better . . .”
He swung the riot gun to bear on her, but he saw she did not even see it.
“Lucy, 111 have to kill you!” he cried. But she no more heard him, apparently, than she saw the muzzle-on view of the riot gun in his hands. The wavering golden barrel in her grasp wobbled to bear on him.
“Oh, Cully!” she wept. “Cully—” And pulled the trigger.
“Oh, hell!” said Cully in despair. And let her shoot him down.
When he came back, things were very fuzzy there at first. He heard the voice of the man in the white jacket, arguing with the voice of Lucy.
“Hallucination—” muttered Cully. The voices broke off.
“Oh, he said something!” cried the voice of Lucy.
“Cully?” said the man’s voice. Cully felt a two-finger grip on his wrist in the area where his pulse should be—if, that was, he had a pulse. “How’re you feeling?”
“Ship’s doctor?” muttered Cully, with great effort. “You got the Star of the North?”
“That’s right. All under control. How do you feel?”
“Feel fine,” mumbled Cully. The doctor laughed.
“Sure you do,” said the doctor. “Nothing like being shot a couple of times and having a pellet and a dart removed to put a man in good shape.”
“Not Lucy’s fault—” muttered Cully. “Not understand.” He made another great effort in the interests of explanation. “Stars’n eyes.”
“Oh, what does he mean?” wept Lucy.
“He means,” said the voice of the doctor harshly, “that you’re just the sort of fine young idealist who makes the best sort of sucker for the sort of propaganda the Old World’s Confederation dishes out.”
“Oh, you’d say that!” flared Lucy’s voice. “Of course, you’d say that!”
“Young lady,” said the doctor, “how rich do you think our friend Cully, here, is?”
Cully heard her blow her nose, weakly.
“He’s got millions, I suppose,” she said, bitterly. “Hasn’t he hilifted dozens of ships?”
“He’s hilifted eight,” said the doctor, dryly, “which, incidentally, puts him three ships ahead of any other contender for the title of hilifting champion around the populated stars. The mortality rate among single workers—and you can’t get any more than a single ’lifter aboard Confederation ships nowadays—hits ninety per cent with the third ship captured. But I doubt Cully’s been able to save many millions on a salary of six hundred a month, and a bonus of one tenth of one per cent of salvage value, at Colonial World rates.”
There was a moment of profound silence.
“What do you mean?” said Lucy, in a voice that wavered a little.
“I’m trying,” said the doctor, “for the sake of my patient— and perhaps for your own—to push aside what Cully calls those stars in your eyes and let a crack of surface daylight through.”
“But why would he work for a salary—like that?” Disbelief was strong in her voice.
“Possibly,” said the doctor, “just possibly because the picture of a bloodstained hilifter with a
knife between his teeth, carousing in Colonial bars, shooting down Confederation officers for the fun of it, and dragging women passengers off by the hair, has very little to do with the real facts of a man like Cully.” .
“Smart girl,” managed Cully. “S’little mixed up, s’all—” He managed to get his vision cleared a bit. The other two were standing facing each other, right beside his bed. The doctor had a slight flush above his cheekbones and looked angry.
Lucy, Cully noted anxiously, was looking decidedly pale. “Mixed up—” Cully said again.
“Mixed up isn’t the word for it,” said the doctor angrily, without looking down at him. “She and all ninety-nine out of a hundred people on the Old Worlds.” He went on to Lucy. “You met Cully Earthside. Evidently you liked him there. He didn’t strike you as the scum of the stars, then.
“But all you have to do is hear him tagged with the name ‘hilifter’ and immediately your attitude changes.”
Lucy swallowed.
“No,” she said, in a small voice, “it didn’t. . . change.”
“Then who do you think’s wrong—you or Cully?” The doctor snorted. “If I have to give you reasons, what’s the use? If you can’t see things straight for yourself, who can help you? That’s what’s wrong with all the people back on the Old Worlds.”
“I believe Cully,” she said. “I just don’t know why I should.”
“Who has lots of raw materials—the raw materials to support trade—but hasn’t any trade?” asked the doctor.
She frowned at him.
“Why ... the New Worlds haven’t any trade on their own,” she said. “But they’re too undeveloped yet, too young—”
“Young? There’s three to five generations on most of them!”
The Star Road Page 4