by Keith Laumer
The upper bay was chaos. I grabbed a gun from a lanky grandpa who was waving it and yelling, and fired over the crowd. Nobody noticed. Ommu joined me, and with a few crewmen, we formed up a flying wedge. Ommu got the hatch open while the rest of us beat back the mob. All this time, Eureka had stayed close to me, with his ears flattened and his tail twitching.
“Take ’em in order,” I told Ornmu. “Anybody tries to walk over somebody else, I’ll shoot him!” Two seconds later I had to make that good when a beefy two-hundred-pounder charged me. I blew a hole through him and the rest of them scattered back. The boat had been designed for fifty passengers; we had eighty-seven aboard when a wall of fire came rolling down the corridor and Ommu grabbed me just in time and hauled me in across the laps of a fat woman and a middle-aged man who was crying, and Eureka bounded in past me. I got forward and threw in the big red lever and a big boot kicked us and then there was the sick, null-G feel that meant we’d cleared the launch tube and were on our own.
In the two-by-four Command compartment, I watched the small screen where five miles away the ship was rotating slowly, end-over-end, with debris trailing off from her in a lazy spiral. Flashes of light sparkled at points along the hull where smashed piping was spewing explosive mixtures. Her back broke and the aft third of the ship separated and a cloud of tiny objects, some of them human, scattered out into the void, exploding as they hit vacuum. The center section blew then, and when the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but a major fragment of the stern, glowing red-hot, and an expanding dust-cloud.
“Any other boats get away?” I asked.
“I didn’t see any, Billy.”
“There were five thousand people aboard that scow! We can’t be the only survivors!” I yelled at him, as if convincing him would make it true. A powerman named Lath stuck his head in. “We’ve got some casualties back here,” he said. “Where in the Nine Hells are we, anyway?”
I checked the chart screen. The nearest world was a planet named Cyoc, blue-coded, which meant uninhabited and uninhabitable.
“Nothing there but a beacon,” Ommu said. “An ice world.”
We checked; found nothing within a year’s range that was any better-or as good.
“Cyoc it is,” I said. “Now let’s take a look at what we’ve got to work with.”
I led the way down the no-G central tube past the passenger cells that were arranged radially around it, like the kernels on a corncob. They were badly overcrowded. There seemed to be a lot of women and children. Maybe the mob had demonstrated some of the chivalric instincts, after all; or maybe Ommu had done some selecting I didn’t notice. I wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing.
A big man, wearing what had been expensive clothes before the mob got them, pushed out in the aisle up ahead of me, waited for me to come to him.
“I’m Till Ognath, member of the Ahacian Assembly,” he stated. “As highest ranking individual aboard, I’m assuming command. I see you’re crew; I want you men to run a scan of the nearby volume of space and give me a choice of five possible destinations within our cruise capability. Then-”
“This is Chief Danger, Power Section,” Ommu butted into his spiel. “He’s ranking crew.”
Assemblyman Ognath looked me over. “Better give me the gun.” He held out a broad, well-tended hand.
“I’ll keep it,” I said. “I’ll be glad to have your help, Assemblyman.”
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” Ognath showed me a well-bred frown.
“As a member of the World Assembly of Ahax, I-”
“Ranking crew member assumes command, Assemblyman,” Ommu cut him off. “Better crawl back in your hole, Mister, before you qualify yourself for proceedings under space law.”
“You’d quote law to me, you-” Ognath’s vocabulary failed him.
“I’ll let you know how you can best be of service, Assemblyman,” I told him, and we moved on and left him still looking for a suitable word.
The boat was in good shape, fully equipped and supplied-for fifty people, all of whom were presumed to have had plenty of time to pack and file aboard like ladies and gentlemen. Assemblyman Ognath made a formal complaint about the presence of an animal aboard, but he was howled down. Everybody seemed to think a mascot was lucky. Anyway, Eureka ate very little and took up no useful space. Two of the injured died the first day, three more in the next week. We put them out the lock and closed ranks.
There wasn’t much room for modesty aboard, for those with strong feelings about such matters. One man objected to another man’s watching his wife taking a sponge bath-(ten other people were watching, too; they had no choice in the matter, unless they screwed their eyes shut) and knocked his front teeth out with a belt-buckle. Two days later, the jealous one turned up drifting in the no-G tube with his windpipe crushed. Nobody seemed to miss him much, not even the wife.
Two hundred and sixty-nine hours after we’d kicked free of the foundering ship, we were maneuvering for an approach to Cyoc. From five hundred miles up, it looked like one huge snowball.
It was my first try at landing an atmosphere boat. I’d run through plenty of drills, but the real thing was a little different. Even with fully automated controls that only needed a decision made for them here and there along the way, there were still plenty of things to do wrong. I did them all. After four hours of the roughest ride this side of a flatwheeled freight car, we slammed down hard in a mountain-rimmed icefield something over four hundred miles from the beacon station.
CHAPTER SIX
The rough landing had bloodied a few noses, one of them mine, broken an arm or two, and opened a ten-foot seam in the hull that let in a blast of refrigerated air; but that was incidental. The real damage was to the equipment compartment forward. The power plant had been knocked right through the side of the boat. That meant no heat, no light, and no communications. Assemblyman Ognath told me what he thought of my piloting ability. I felt pretty bad until Ommu got him to admit he knew even less about atmosphere flying than I did.
The outside temperature was ten below freezing; that made it a warm day, for Cyoc. The sun was small and a long way off, glaring in a dark, metallic sky. It shed a sort of gray, before-the-storm light over a hummocky spread of glacier that ended at blue peaks, miles away. Assemblyman Ognath told me that now we were on terra firma he was taking charge, and that we would waste no time taking steps for rescue. He didn’t say what steps. I told him I’d retain command as long as the emergency lasted. He fumed and used some strong language, but I was still wearing the gun. There were a lot of complaints from the passengers about the cold, the short rations, the recycled water, bruises, and other things. They’d been all right, in space, glad to be alive. Now that they were ashore they seemed to expect instant relief. I called some of the men aside for a conference.
“I’m taking a party to make the march to the beacon,” I told them.
“Party?” Ognath bellied up to me. “We’ll all go! Only by pulling together can we hope to survive!”
“I’m taking ten men,” I said. “The rest stay here.”
“You expect us to huddle here in this wreck, and slowly freeze to death?”
Ognath wanted to know.
“Not you, Assemblyman,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”
He didn’t like that, either. He said his place was with the people.
“I want the strongest, best-fed men,” I said. “We’ll be traveling with heavy packs at first. I can’t have stragglers.”
“Why not just yourself, and this fellow?” Ognath jerked a thumb at Ommu.
“We’re taking half the food with us. Somebody has to carry it.”
“Half the food-for ten men? And you’d leave seventy-odd women and children to share what’s left?”
“That’s right. We’ll leave now. There’s still a few hours of daylight.”
Half an hour later we were ready to go, the cat included. The cold didn’t seem to bother him. The packs were too big by half, b
ut they’d get lighter.
“Where’s your pack, Danger?” Ognath wanted to know.
“I’m not carrying one,” I told him. I left the boat in charge of a crewman with a sprained wrist; when I looked back at the end of the first hour all I could see was ice.
We made fifteen miles before sunset. When we camped, several of the men complained about the small rations, and a couple mentioned the food I gave Eureka. Ognath made another try to gather support for himself as trail boss, but without much luck. We turned in and slept for five hours. It wasn’t daylight yet when I rolled them out. One man complained that his suit-pack was down; he was shivering, and blue around the lips. I sent him back and distributed his pack among the others.
We went on, into rougher country, sprinkled with rock slabs that pushed up through the ice. The ground was rising, and footing was treacherous. When I called the noon halt, we had made another ten miles.
“At this rate, we’ll cover the distance in ten days,” Ognath informed me.
“The rations could be doubled, easily! We’re carrying enough for forty days!”
He had some support on that point. I said no. After a silent meal and a ten-minute rest, we went on. I watched the men. Ognath was a complainer but he held his position up front. Two men had a tendency to straggle. One of them seemed to be having trouble with his pack. I checked on him, found he had a bad bruise on his shoulder from a fall during the landing. I chewed him out and sent him back to the boat.
“If anybody else is endangering this party by being noble, speak up now,” I told them. Nobody did. We went on, down to eight men already, and only twenty-four hours out.
The climbing was stiff for the rest of the day. Night caught us halfway to a high pass. Everybody was dog-tired. Ommu came over and told me the packs were too heavy.
“They’ll get lighter,” I told him.
“Maybe if you carried one you’d see it my way,” he came back.
“Maybe that’s why I’m not carrying one.”
We spent a bad night in the lee of an ice-ridge. I ordered all suits set for minimum heat to conserve power. At dawn we had to dig ourselves out of drifted snow.
We made the pass by mid-afternoon, and were into a second line of hills by dark. Up until then, everyone had been getting by on his initial charge; now the strain was starting to show. When morning came, two men had trouble getting started. After the first hour, one of them passed out cold. I left him and the other fellow with a pack between them, to make it back to the boat. By dark, we’d put seventy-five miles behind us. I began to lose track of days then. One man slipped on a tricky climb around a crevasse and we lost him, pack and all. That left five of us: myself, Ommu, Ognath, a passenger named Choom, and Lath, one of my power-section crew. Their faces were hollow and when they pulled their masks off their eyes looked like wild animals’; but we’d weeded out the weak ones now.
At a noonday break, Ognath watched me passing out the ration cans.
“I thought so,” his fruity baritone was just a croak now. “Do you men see what he’s doing?” He turned to the others, who had sprawled on their backs as usual as soon as I called the halt. “No wonder Danger’s got more energy than the rest of us! He’s giving himself double rations-for himself and the animal!”
They all sat up and stared my way.
“How about it?” Ommu asked. “Is he right?”
“Never mind me,” I told them. “Just eat and get what rest you can. We’ve still got nearly three hundred miles to do.”
Ommu got to his feet. “Time you doubled up on rations for all of us,” he said. The other two men were sitting up, watching.
“I’ll decide when it’s time,” I told him.
“Ognath, open a pack and hand out an extra ration all around,” Ommu said.
“Touch a pack and I’ll kill you,” I said. “Lie down and get your rest, Ommu.”
They stood there and looked at me.
“Better be careful how you sleep from now on, Danger,” Ommu said. Nobody said anything while we finished eating and shouldered packs and started on. I marched at the rear now, watching them. I couldn’t afford to let them fail. The Lady Raire was counting on me.
At the halfway point, I was still feeling fairly strong. Ognath and Choom had teamed up to help each other over the rough spots, and Ommu and Lath stuck together. None of them said anything to me unless they had to. Eureka had taken to ranging far offside, looking for game, maybe. Each day’s march was like the one before. We got on our feet at daylight, wolfed down the ration, and hit the trail. Our best speed was about two miles per hour now. The scenery never changed. When I estimated we’d done two hundred and fifty miles-about the fifteenth day-I increased the ration. We made better time that day, and the next. Then the pace began to drag again. The next day, there were a lot of falls. It wasn’t just rougher ground; the men were reaching the end of their strength. We halted in mid-afternoon and I told them to turn their suit heaters up to medium range. I saw Ognath and Choom swap looks. I went over to the assemblyman and checked his suit; it was on full high. So was Choom’s.
“Don’t blame them, Danger,” Ommu said. “On short rations they were freezing to death.”
The next day Choom’s heat-pack went out. He kept up for an hour; then he fell and couldn’t get up. I checked his feet; they were frozen waxy-white, ice-hard, hallway to the knee.
We set up a tent for him, left fourteen days’ rations, and went on. Assemblyman Ognath told me this would be one of the items I’d answer for at my trial.
“Not unless we reach the beacon,” I reminded him. Two days later, Ognath jumped me when he thought I was asleep. He didn’t know I had scattered ice chips off my boots around me as a precaution. I woke up just in time to roll out of his way. He rounded and came for me again and Eureka knocked him down and stood over him, snarling in a way to chill your blood. Lath and Ommu heard him yell and I had to hold the gun on them to get them calmed down.
“Rations,” Ognath said. “Divide them up now; four even shares!”
I turned him down. Ommu told me what he’d do to me as soon as he caught me without the gun. Lath asked me if I was willing to kill the cat, now that it had gone mad and was attacking people. I let them talk. When they had it out of their systems, we went on. That afternoon Ommu fell and couldn’t get up. I took his pack and told Lath to help him. An hour later Lath was down. I called a halt, issued a triple ration all around and made up what was left of the supplies into two packs. Ognath complained, but he took one and I took the other.
The next day was a hard one. We were into broken ground again, and Ognath was having trouble with his load, even though it was a lot lighter than the one he’d started with. Ommu and Lath took turns helping each other up. Sometimes it was hard to tell which one was helping which. We made eight miles and pitched camp. The next day we did six miles; the next five; the day after that, Ognath fell and sprained an ankle an hour after we’d started. By then we had covered three hundred and sixty miles.
“We’ll make camp here,” I said. “Ommu and Lath, lend a hand.”
I used the filament gun on narrow-beam to cut half a dozen foot-cube blocks of snow. When I told Ommu to start stacking them in a circle, he just looked at me.
“He’s gone crazy,” he said. “Listen, Lath; you too, Ognath. We’ve got to rush him. He can’t kill all three of us-”
“We’re going to build a shelter,” I told him. “You’ll stay warm there until I get back.”
“What are you talking about?” Lath was hobbling around offside, trying to get behind me. I waved him back.
“This is the end of the line for you. Ognath can’t go anywhere; you two might make another few miles, but the three of you together will have a better chance.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Ognath got himself up on one elbow to call out. “Are you abandoning us now?”
“He planned it this way all along,” Lath whispered. His voice had gone a couple of days before. “Ma
de us pack his food for him, used us as draft animals; and now that we’re used up, he’ll leave us here to die.”
Ommu was the only one who didn’t spend the next ten minutes swearing at me. He flopped down on the snow and watched me range the snow blocks in a ten-foot circle. I cut and carried up more and built the second course. When I had the third row in place, he got up and silently started chinking the gaps with snow.
It took two hours to finish the igloo, including a six-foot entrance tunnel and a sanitary trench a few feet away.
“We’ll freeze inside that,” Ognath was almost blubbering now. “When our suit-packs go, we’ll freeze!”
I opened the packs and stacked part of the food, made up one light pack.
“Look,” Ognath was staring at the small heap of ration cans. “He’s leaving us with nothing! We’ll starve, while he stuffs his stomach!”
“If you starve you won’t freeze,” I said. “Better get him inside,” I told Ommu and Lath.
“He won’t be stuffing his stomach much,” Ommu said. “He’s leaving us twice what he’s taking for himself.”
“But-where’s all the food he’s been hoarding?”
“We’ve been eating it for the past week,” Ommu said. “Shut up, Ognath. You talk too much.”
We put Ognath in the igloo. It was already warmer inside, from the yellowish light filtering through the snow walls. I left them then, and with Eureka pacing beside me, started off in what I hoped was the direction of the beacon.
My pack weighed about ten pounds; I had food enough for three days’
half-rations. I was still in reasonable shape, reasonably well-fed. With luck, I expected to make the beacon in two days’ march. I didn’t have luck. I made ten miles before dark, slept cold and hungry, put in a full second day. By sundown I had covered the forty miles, but all I could see was flat plain and glare ice, all the way to the horizon. According to the chart, the beacon was built on a hundred-foot knoll that would be visible for at least twenty miles. That meant one more day, minimum. I did the day, and another day. I rechecked my log, and edited all the figures downward; and I still should have been in sight of home base by now. That night Eureka disappeared.