Next of Kin

by Eric Frank Russell

  “Thanks.” In the corridor the first person Leeming encountered was Commodore Keen. Being too burdened to salute, he threw the other a regulation eyes-left which Keen acknowledged with a curt nod. Keen brushed past and entered the room. His loud, harsh voice boosted out the open door.

  “Ah, Davies, so you have settled in. Since you won’t be required today you can clean up this hog-pen in readiness for mp inspection this evening.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mallarqui.”

  “WHAT?”

  Outside, Leeming took a firmer grip on his bags and ran like hell.

  The ship was a beauty, the same diameter as an ordinary scout-vessel but over twice the length. These proportions made it look less like a one-man snoop-boat than a miniature cruiser. Standing on its tail, it towered so high that its nose seemed to reach halfway towards the clouds.

  Studying it appreciatively, Leeming asked, “Any more like this!”

  “Three,” responded Montecelli, the spaceport’s chief engineer. “All hidden elsewhere with a tight security ring around them. Strict orders from above say that this type of vessel may be used only one at a time. A second must not be sent out until after yours has returned.”

  “So I’m first on the list, eh? What if I don’t come back? What if this ship is destroyed and you’ve no way of knowing?”

  The other shrugged. “That’s the War Staff’s worry, not mine. I only obey directives from above and those can be trouble enough.”

  “H’m! Probably they’ve set a time limit far my safe return. If I’m not back by then they’ll assume that I’m a gone goose.”

  “They haven’t said anything to you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t you worry either. Life’s too short. In time of war it gets shortened for many.” Montecelli scowled at the sky. “Whenever a boat boosts upward on a column of flame I never know whether that’ll be the last I’ll ever see of it.”

  “That’s right, cheer me on my way,” said Leeming. “The life and soul of the party.”

  “Sorry, I clean forgot you’re going:” He pointed to an adjacent building. “In there we’ve set up a duplicate nose-cabin far training purposes. It will take you most of a week to become accustomed to the new-type controls, to learn how to handle the transpatial radio and generally get the feel of things. You can start your education as soon as you like.”

  “All I’m bothered about is the autopilot,” Leeming told him. “It had better be a good one. A fellow can’t travel for days and weeks without sleep and he can’t snooze with the ship running wild. A really reliable, autopilot is his fairy godmother.”

  “Listen, son, if this one could do more than hold you on course while jerking you away from dangers, if it could see and think and transmit reports, we’d send it away without you.” Montecelli gave his listener a reassuring slap on the shoulder. “It’s the best ever. It’d take care of you even if you were on your honeymoon and temporarily unconscious of the cosmos.”

  “The only resemblance is that I’ll need my strength,” said Leeming. He entered the building and more or less stayed in it for the prescribed week.

  The take-off came at one hour after sunset. There was a cloudless sky, velvet black and spangled with stars. Strange to think that far, far out there, concealed by sheer distance, were countless populated worlds with Combine warships parading warily between some of them while the allied fleets of Terrans, Sirians, Rigellians and others were on the prowl across an enormous front.

  Below, long chains of arc-lights dithered as a gentle breeze swept across the spaceport. Beyond the safety barriers that defined the coming blast-area a group of people were waiting to witness the ascent. If the ship toppled instead of going up, thought Leeming wryly, the whole lot of them would race for sanctuary with burning backsides. It did not occur to him that in such an event he would be in poor position to enjoy the sight. A voice came out of the tiny loudspeaker set in the cabin wall. “Warm up Pilot.”

  He pressed a button. Something went whump, then the ship groaned and shuddered while a great circular cloud of dust and vapour rolled across the concrete and concealed the safety barriers. The low groaning and trembling continued while he sat in silence, his full attention upon the instrument bank. The needles of twenty meters crawled to the right, quivered awhile, became still. That meant steady and equal pressure in the twenty stern tubes.

  “Everything all right, Pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take off at will.” A pause; followed by, “Lots of luck!”

  “Thanks!”

  He let the tubes blow for another half minute before gradually lie moved the tiny booster-lever towards him. Shuddering increased, the groan raised its pitch until it became a howl, the cabin windows misted over and the sky was obscured.

  For a nerve-wracking second the vessel rocked on its tail-fins. Then it began to creep upward, a foot, a yard, ten yards. The howl was now a shriek. The chronically slow rate of climb suddenly changed as something seemed to give the vessel a hearty shove in the rear. Up it went, a hundred feet, a thousand, ten thousand. Through the clouds and into the deep of the night. The cabin windows were clear, the sky was full of stars and the Moon looked huge.

  The loudspeaker said in faint, squeaky tones, “Nice work, Pilot.”

  “All my work is nice,” 5etorted Leeming. “See you in the asylum.”

  There was no answer to that. They knew that he’d become afflicted with an exaggerated sense of freedom referred to as take-off intoxication. Most pilots suffered from it as soon as a planet lay behind their tail and only the stars could be seen ahead. The symptoms consisted of sardonic comments. and abuse raining down from the sky.

  “Go get a haircut,” bawled Leeming into his microphone. He jiggled around in his seat while the ship boomed onward.

  “And clean up that hog-pen. Haven’t you been taught how to salute? Baloney baffles brains!”

  They didn’t answer that, either.

  But down in the spaceport control-tower the duty officer pulled a face and said to Montecelli, “You know, I think that Einstein never worked out the whole of it.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I have a theory that as one approaches the velocity of light one’s inhibitions shrink to zero.”

  “You may have something there,” Montecelli conceded.

  “Pork and beans, pork and beans, Holy God, pork and beans,” squawked the control-tower speaker with swiftly fading strength. “Get undressed because I want to test your eyes. Now inhale. Keen by name and keen by—”

  The duty officer switched it off.

  TWO

  He picked up the escort in the Sirian sector, the first encounter being made when he was fast asleep. Activated by a challenging signal on a pre-set frequency, the alarm sounded just above his ear and caused him to dive out of the bunk while no more than half awake. For a moment he gazed stupidly around while the ship vibrated and the autopilot went tick-tick.

  “Zern kaid-whit?” rasped the loudspeaker. “Zern kaid-whit?”

  That was code and meant; “identify yourself-friend or foe?”

  Taking the pilot’s seat, he turned a key that caused his transmitter to squirt forth a short and ultra-rapid series of numbers. Then he rubbed his eyes and looked into the forward starfield. Apart from the majestic haze of suns shining in the dark there was nothing to be seen with the naked eye. So he switched on his thermosensitive detector screens and was rewarded with a line of brilliant dots paralleling his course to starboard while a second group, in arrow formation, was about to cut across far ahead of his nose. He was not seeing the ships, of course, but only the visible evidence of their white-hot propulsion tubes and flaming tails.

  “Keefa” said the loudspeaker, meaning, “All correct!”

  Crawling back into the bunk, Leeming hauled a blanket over his face, closed his eyes and left the autopilot to carry on. After ten minutes his mind began to drift into a pleasant, soothing dream about sleeping in free space
with nobody to bother him.

  Dropping its code-talk, the loudspeaker yelped in plain language, “Cut speed before we lose you.”

  He sat up as if stung, stared blearily across the cabin. Some-body had spoken; somebody with a parade-ground voice. Or had he imagined it? He waited a bit but nothing happened and so he lay down again.

  The loudspeaker bawled impatiently, “You deaf? Cut speed before we lose you!”

  Leeming clambered irefully from the bunk, sat at the controls, adjusted them slowly. A thin braking-jet in the bow let go a double plume of vapour that swept back on either side as the ship overtook and passed by. The stern-tubes meanwhile decreased their thrust. He watched his meters until he thought their needles had dropped far enough to make the others happy. Then he returned to bed and hid himself under the blanket.

  It seemed to him that he was swinging in a celestial hammock and enjoying a wonderful idleness when the loudspeaker roared, “Cut more! Cut more!”

  He shot out from under the blanket, scrambled to the controls and cut more. Then he switched on his transmitter and made a speech distinguished by its passion. It was partly a seditious outburst and partly a lecture upon the basic functions of the human body. From all he knew the astonished listeners might include two rear-admirals and a dozen commodores. If so, he was educating them.

  In return he received no heated retorts, no angry voice of authority. If he had broadcast the same words from a heavily manned battleship they’d have plastered him with forty charges and set the date for his court-martial. But it was space-navy convention that a lone scout’s job created an unavoidable craziness among all those who performed it and that ninety percent of them were overdue for psychiatric treatment. A scout on active service could and often did say things that nobody else in the space-navy dared utter. It is a wonderful thing to be recognised as dotty.

  For three weeks they accompanied him in the glum silence with which a family takes around an imbecile relation. He chafed impatiently during this period because their top speed was far, far below his maximum velocity and the need to keep pace with them gave him the feeling of an urgent motorist trapped behind a funeral procession.

  The Sirian battleship Wassoon was the chief culprit, a great clumsy contraption that wallowed along like a bloated hippopotamus while a shoal of faster cruisers and destroyers were compelled to amble with it. He did not know its name but he did know that it was a battleship because on his detector screens it resembled a glowing pea amid an array of fiery pinheads. Every time he looked at the pea he cursed it something awful. He was, again venting his ire upon it when the loudspeaker chipped in and spoke for the first time in many days.

  “Ponk!”

  Ponk? What the devil was ponk? The word meant something mighty important, he could remember that much. Hastily he scrabbled through his codebook and found it: Enemy in sight.

  No sign of the foe was visible on his screens. Evidently they were beyond detector range and had been spotted only by the escort’s advance guard of four destroyers running far ahead.

  “Dial F,” ordered the loudspeaker.

  So they were changing frequency in readiness for battle. Leeming touched the dial of his multiband receiver from T back to F. Laconic interfleet messages came through the speaker in a steady stream.

  “Offside group port twenty, rising inclination twelve.”

  “Check!”

  “Break off.”

  “Check!”

  On the screens five glowing dots swiftly angled away from the main body of the escort: Four were mere pinheads, the fifth and middle one about half the size of the pea. A cruiser and four destroyers were escaping the combat area for the time-honoured purpose of getting between the enemy and his nearest base.

  In a three-dimensional medium where speeds were tremendous and space was vast this tactic never worked. It did not stop both sides from trying to make it work whenever the opportunity came along. This could be viewed as eternal optimism or persistent stupidity, according to the state of one’s liver.

  The small group of would-be ambushers scooted as fast as they could make it, hoping to become lost within the confusing welter of starlights before the enemy came near enough to detect the move. Meanwhile the Wasoon and its attendant cohort plugged steadily onward. Ahead, almost at the limit of the fleet’s detector range, the four destroyers continued to advance without attempting to disperse or change course.

  “Two groups of ten converging from forty-five degrees rightward, descending inclination fifteen;” reported the forward destroyers.

  “Classification?” demanded the Wassoon.

  “Not possible yet.”

  Silence for six hours, then, “Two groups still maintaining same course; each appears to consist of two heavy cruisers and eight monitors.”

  That was sheer guesswork based upon the theory that the greater the detectable heat the bigger the ship. Leeming watched his screens knowing full well that the enemy’s vessels might prove to be warships as the observers supposed or might equally well turn out to be escorted convoys of merchantmen. Since the spatial war first broke out many a lumbering tramp had been mistaken for a monitor.

  Slowly, ever so slowly twenty faintly discernible dots bloomed into his screens. This was the time when he and his escort should be discovered by the enemy’s detection devices. The foe must have spotted the leading destroyers hours ago; either they weren’t worried about a mere four ships or, more likely, had taken it for granted that they were friendly. It would be interesting to watch their reaction when they found the strong force farther behind.

  He did not get the chance to observe this pleasing phenomenon. The loudspeaker let go a squawk of, “Ware zenith! ” and automatically his gaze perked upward to the screens above his head. They were poxed with a host of rapidly enlarging dots He estimated that sixty to eighty ships were diving in fast at ninety degrees to the plane of the escort; but he didn’t stop to count them. One glance was sufficient to tell him that he was in a definite hot-spot.

  Forthwith he lifted his slender vessel’s nose and switched to full boost. The result pinned him in his seat while his intestines tried to wrap themselves around his spine: It was easy to imagine the effect upon the enemy’s screens; they would see one mysterious, unidentifiable ship break loose from the target area and swoop around them at a speed previously thought impossible.

  With luck, they might assume that what one ship could do all the others could do likewise. If there is anything a spaceship captain detests it is to have another and faster ship sneaking up on his tail. The fiery end of a spaceship is its weak spot for there can be no effective armament in an area filled with propulsors.

  Stubbornly Leeming stuck to the upward curve which, if maintained long enough, would take him well to one side of the approaching attackers and around to the back of them. He kept full attention upon his screens. The oncomers held course in a tight, vengeful knot for four hours, by which time they were almost within shooting distance of the escort. At that point their nerve failed. The fact that the escort still kept impassive formation while one ship headed like a shooting star for their rear made them suspect a trap. One thing the Combine never lacked was suspicion of the Allies’ motives and unshakable faith in their cunning.

  So they curved out at right-angles and spread in all directions like the petals of a blown flower, their detectors probing for another and bigger fleet that might be lurking just beyond visibility.

  Belting along at top pace, one Lathian light cruiser realized that its new course would bring it within range of the missiles with which Leeming’s strange, superfast ship presumably was armed. It tried to play safe by changing course again and thereby delivered itself into the hands of the Wassoon’s electronic predictors. The Wassoon fired, its missiles met the cruiser at the precise point where it came within range. Cruiser and missiles tried to occupy the same space at the same time. The result was, a soundless explosion of great magnitude and a flare of heat that temporarily obliterated
every detector screen within range.

  Another blast shone briefly high in the starfield and far beyond reach of the escort’s armaments. A few minutes later a thin, reedy voice, distorted by static, reported that a straggling enemy destroyer had fallen foul of the distant ambushing party. This sudden loss, right outside the scene of action, seemed to confirm the enemy’s belief that the Wassoon and its attendant fleet might be mere bait in a trap loaded with something formidable. They continued to radiate fast from their common centre in an effort to locate the hidden menace and, at the same time, avoid being caught in a bunch.

  Seeing them thus darting away like a shoal of frightened fish, Leeming muttered. steadily to himself. A dispersed fleet should be easy prey to a superfast ship capable of overhauling and dealing with its units one by one. He had to face the fact that his vessel could do nothing more than scare them individually while he lavished futile curses upon them. Without a single effective weapon he was impotent to take advantage of an opportunity that might never occur again. For the moment he had quite forgotten his role, not to mention his strict orders to avoid a space-fight at all costs.

  The Wassoon soon reminded him with a sharp call of, “Scout pilot, where the hell d’you think you’re going?”

  “Up and around,” replied Leeming sourly.

  “You’re more of a liability than an asset,” retorted the Wassoon, unappreciative of his efforts. “Get out while the going is good.”

  Leeming yelled into the microphone, “I know when I’m not wanted, see? Spitting on parade is a punishable offence, see? Remember, man, you must always salute a commodore. Stand properly to attention when you speak to me! We’re being sabotaged by defective zippers. Come on, lift those feet, Dopey-one, two, three, hup!”

  As before, the listeners took no notice whatsoever. Leeming turned his ship on to a new course with plane parallel to that of the escort and high above them. They now became visible on his underbelly screens and showed themselves in the same. unbroken formation by sweeping in a wide circle to get on the reverse course. That meant they were leaving him and heading homeward. The enemy, still scattered beyond shooting range, must have viewed this move as wicked temptation for although in superior strength they continued to refrain from direct attack.