by Hank Davis
“Well, Rip,” Doc Renn was saying, “It’s all over now—the preliminaries, I mean. We’re going ahead with the big job.”
“Preliminaries?” I goggled. “You mean to tell me that what I’ve been through for the last three years was all preliminaries?”
Renn nodded, watching me carefully. “You’re going on a little trip. It may not be fun, but it’ll be interesting.”
“Trip? Where to?” This was good news; the repeated drills on spaceship techniques, the refresher courses on astrogation, had given me a good-sized itch to get out into the black again.
“Sealed orders,” said Renn, rather sharply. “You’ll find out. The important thing for you to remember is that you have a very important role to play.” He paused. I could see him grimly ironing the snappiness out of his tone. Why in Canaan did he have to be so careful with me? “You will be put aboard a Forfield Super—the latest and best equipped that the league can furnish. Your job is to tend the control machinery, and to act as assistant astrogator no matter what happens. Without doubt, you will find your position difficult at times. You are to obey your orders as given, without question, and without the use of force where possible.”
This sounded screwy to me. “That’s all written up, just about word for word, in the ‘Naval Manual,’” I reminded him gently, “under ‘Duties of Crew.’ I’ve had to do all you said every time I took a ship out. Is there anything special about this one, that it calls for all this underlining?”
He was annoyed, and the board shuffled twenty-two pairs of feet. But his tone was still friendly, half-persuasive when he spoke. “There is definitely something special about this ship, and—its crew. Rip, you’ve come through everything we could hand you, with flying colors. Frankly, you were subgjected to psychic forces that were enough to drive a normal man quite mad. The rest of the crew—it is only fair to tell you—are insane. The nature of this expedition necessitates our manning the ship that way. Your place on the ship is a key position. Your responsibility is a great one.”
“Now—hold on, sir,” I said. “I’m not questioning your orders, sir, and I consider myself under your disposition. May I ask a few questions?”
He nodded.
“You say the crew is insane. Isn’t that a broad way of putting it—” I couldn’t help needling him; he was trying so hard to keep calm— “for a psychologist?”
He actually grinned. “It is. To be more specific, they’re schizoids—dual personalitites. Their primary egos are paranoiac. They’re perfectly rational except on the subject of their particular phobia—or mania as the case may be. The recessive personality is a manic depressive.”
Now, as I remembered it, most paranoiacs have delusions of grandeur coupled with a persecution mania. And a manic depressive is the “Yes master” type. They just didn’t mix. I took the liberty of saying as much to one of Earth’s foremost psychoscientists.
“Of course they don’t mix,” snapped Renn. “I didn’t say they did. There’s no interflowing egos in these cases. They are schizoids. The cleavage is perfect.”
I have a mole under my arm that I scratch when I’m thinking hard. I scratched it. “I didn’t know anything like that existed,” I said. Renn seemed bent on keeping this informal, and I was playing it to the limit. I sensed that this was the last chance I’d have to get any information about the expedition.
“There never were any cases like that until recently,” said Renn patiently. “Those men came out of our laboratories.”
“Oh. Sort of made-to-order insanity?”
He nodded.
“What on earth for, sir?”
“Sealed orders,” he said immediately. His manner became abrupt again. “You take off tomorrow. You’ll be put aboard tonight. Your commanding officer is Captain William Parks.” I grinned delightedly at this. Parks—the horny old fireater! They used to say of him that he could create sunspots by spitting straight up. But he was a real spaceman—through and through. “And don’t forget, Rip,” Renn finished. “There is only one sane man aboard that ship. That is all.”
I saluted and left.
A Forfield Super is as sweet a ship as anything ever launched. There’s none of your great noisy bulk pushed through the ether by a cityful of men, nor is it your completely automatic “Eyehope”—so called because after you slipped your master control tape into the automatic pilot you always said, “you’re on your way, you little hunk of tinfoil—I hope!”
With an eight-man crew, a Forfield can outrun and outride anything else in space. No rockets—no celestial helices—no other such clumsy nonsense drives it. It doesn’t go places by going—it gets there by standing still. By which I mean that the ship achieves what laymen call “Universal stasis.”
The Galaxy is traveling in an orbit about the mythical Dead Center at an almost incredible velocity. A Forfield, with momentum nullified, just stops dead while the Galaxy streams by. When the objective approaches, momentum is resumed, and the ship appears in normal space with only a couple of thousand miles to go. That is possible because the lack of motion builds up a potential in motion; motion, being a relative thing, produces a set of relative values.
Instead of using the terms “action” and “reaction” in speaking of the Forfield drive, we speak of “stasis” and “re-stasis.” I’d explain further but I left my spherical slide rule home. Let me add only that a Forfield can achieve stasis in regard to planetary, solar, galactic, or universal orbits. Mix ’em in the right proportions, and you get resultants that will take you anywhere, fast.
I was so busy from the instant I hit the deck that I didn’t have time to think of all the angles of this more-than-peculiar trip. I had to check and double-check every control and instrument from the milliammeter to the huge compound integrators, and with a twenty-four-hour deadline that was no small task. I also had to take a little instruction from a league master mechanic who had installed a couple of gadgets which had been designed and tested at the last minute expressly for this trip. I paid little attention to what went on round me. I didn’t even know the skipper was aboard until I rose from my knew before the integrators, swiveled around on my way to the control board, and all but knocked the old war horse off his feet.
“Rip! I’ll be damned!” he howled. “Don’t tell me—you’re not signed on here?”
“Yup,” I said. “Let go my hand, skipper—I got to be able to hold a pair of needle noses for another hour or so. Yeah, I heard you were going to captain this barrel. How do you like it?”
“Smooth,” he said, looking around, then bringing his grin back to me. He only grinned twice a year because it hurt his face; but when he did, he did it all over. “What do you know about the trip?”
“Nothing except that we have sealed orders.”
“Well, I’ll bet there’s some kind of a honkatonk at the end of the road,” said Parks. “You and I’ve been on . . . how many is it? Six? Eight . . . anyway, we’ve been on plenty of ships together, and we managed to throw a whingding ashore every trip. I hope we can get out Aldebaran way. I hear Susie’s place is under new management again. Heh! Remember the time we—”
I laughed. “Let’s save it, skipper. I’ve got to finish this check-up, and fast. But, man, it’s good to see you again.” We stood looking at each other, and then something popped into my head and I felt my smile washing off. What was it that Dr. Renn had said—“Remember there’s only one sane man aboard!” Oh, no—they hadn’t put Captain Parks through that! Why—
I said, “How do you—feel, cap’n?”
“Swell,” he said. He frowned. “Why? You feel all right?”
Not right then, I didn’t. Captain Parks batty? That was just a little bit lousy. If Renn was right—and he was always right—then his board had given Parks the works, as well as the rest of the crew. All but me, that is. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t feel crazy. “I feel fine,” I said.
“Well, go ahead then,” said Parks, and turned his back.
I went over to
the control board, disconnected the power leads from the radioscope, and checked the dials. For maybe five minutes I felt the old boy’s eyes drilling into the nape of my neck, but I was too upset to say anything more. It got very quiet in there. Small noises drifted into the control room from other parts of the ship. Finally I heard his shoulder brush the doorpost as he walked out.
How much did the captain know about this trip? Did he know that he had a bunch of graduates from the laughing academy to man his ship? I tried to picture Renn informing Parks that he was a paranoiac and a manic depressive, and I failed miserably. Parks would probably take a swing at the doctor. Aw, it just didn’t make sense. It occurred to me that “making sense” was a criterion that we put too much faith in. What do you do when you run across something that isn’t even supposed to make sense?
I slapped the casing back on the radioscope, connected the leads, and called it quits. The speaker over the forward post rasped out, “All hands report to control chamber!” I started, stuck my tools into their clips under the chart table, and headed for the door. Then I remembered I was already in the control room, and subsided against the bulkhead.
They straggled in. All hands were in the pink, well fed and eager. I nodded to three of them, shook hands with another. The skipper came in without looking at me—I rather thought he avoided my eyes. He went straight forward, faced about and put his hands low enough on the canted control board so he could sit on them. Seabiscuit, the quartermaster, and an old shipmate of mine, came and stood beside me. There was an embarrassed murmur of voices while we all awaited the last two stragglers.
Seabiscuit whispered to me, “I once said I’d sail clear to Hell if Bill Parks was cap’n of the ship.”
I said, out of the side of my face, “So?”
“So it looks like I’m goin’ to,” said the Biscuit.
The captain called the roll. That crew was microscopically hand picked. I had heard every single one of the names he called in connection with some famous escapade or other. Harry Voight was our chemist. He is the man who kept two hundred passengers alive for a month with little more than a week’s supply of air and water to work with, after the liner crossed bows with a meteorite on the Pleione run. Bort Brecht was the engineer, a man who could do three men’s work with his artificial hand alone. He lost it in the Pretoria disaster. The gunner was Hoch McCoy, the guy who “invented” the bow and arrow and saved his life when he was marooned on an asteroid in the middle of a pack of poison-toothed “Jackrabbits.” The mechanics were Phil and Jo Hartley, twins, whose resemblance enabled them to change places time and again during the Insurrection, thus running bales of vital information to the league high command.
“Report,” he said to me.
“All’s well in the control chamber, sir,” I said formally.
“Brecht?”
“All’s well back aft, sir.”
“Quartermaster?”
“Stores all stored and stashed away, sir,” said the Biscuit.
Parke turned to the control board and threw a lever. The air locks slid shut, the thirty-second departure signal began to sound from the oscillator on the hull and from signals here and in the engineer’s chamber. Parks raised his voice to be heard over their clamor.
“I don’t know where we’re goin’,” he said, with an odd smile, “but—” the signals stopped, and that was deafening—“we’re on our way!”
The master control he had thrown had accomplished all the details of taking off—artificial gravity, “solar” and “planetary” stases, air pumps, humidifiers—everything. Except for the fact that there was suddenly no light streaming in through the portholes any more, there was no slightest change in sensation. Parks reached out and tore the seals off the tape slot on the integrators and from the door of the orders file. He opened the cubbyhold and drew out a thick envelope. There was something in my throat I couldn’t swallow.
He tore it open and pulled out eight envelopes and a few folded sheets of paper. He glanced at the envelopes and, with raised eyebrows, handed them to me. I took them. There was one addressed to each member of the crew. At a nod from the skipper, I distributed them. Parks unfolded his orders and looked at them.
“Orders,” he said. “By authority of the Solar League, pertaining to destination and operations of Xantippean Expedition No. 1.”
Startled glances were batted back and forth. Xantippe! No one had ever been to Xantippe. The weird, cometary planet of Betelgeuse was, and had always been, taboo—and for good reason.
Park’s voice was tight. “Orders to be read to crew by the captain immediately upon taking off.” The skipper went to the pilot chair, swiveled it, and sat down. The crew edged closer.
“The League congratulates itself on its choice of a crew for this most important mission. Out of twenty-seven hundred volunteers, these eight men survived the series of tests and conditioning exercises provided by the league.
“General orders are to proceed to Xantippe. Captain and crew have been adequately protected against the field. Object of the expedition is to find the cause of the Xantippe Field and to remove it.
“Specific orders for each member of the crew are enclosed under separate sealed covers. The crew is ordered to read these instructions, to memorize them, and to destroy the orders and envelopes. The league desires that these orders be read in strictest secrecy by each member of the crew, and that the individual contents of the envelopes be held as confidential until contrary orders are issued by the league.” Parks drew a deep breath and looked around at his crew.
They were a steady lot. There was evidence of excitement, of surprise, and in at least one case, of shock. But there was no fear. Predominantly, there was a kind of exultance in the spaceburned, hard-bitten faces. They bore a common glory, a common hatred. “That isn’t sensible,” I told myself. “It isn’t natural, or normal, or sane, for eight men to face madness, years of it, with that joyous light in their eyes. But then—they’re mad already, aren’t they? Aren’t they?”
It was catching, too. I began to hate Xantippe. Which was, I suppose, silly. Xantippe was a planet, of a sort. Xantippe never killed anybody. It drove them mad, that was all. More than mad—it fused their synapses, reduced them to quivering, mindless hulks, drooling, their useless minds turned supercargo in a useless body. Xantippe had snared ship upon ship in the old days; ships bound for the other planets of the great star. The mad planet used to blanket them in its mantle of vibrations, and they were never heard from again. It was years before the league discovered where the ships had gone, and then they sent patrols to investigate. They lost eighteen ships and thirty thousand men that way.
And then came the Forfield Drive. In the kind of static hyperspace which these ships inhabited, surely they would pass the field unharmed. There were colonists out there on the other planets, depending on supplies from Sol. There were rich sources of radon, uranium, tantalum, copper. Surely a Forfield ship could—
But they couldn’t. They were the first ships to penetrate the field, to come out on the other side. The ships were intact, but their crews could use their brains for absolutely nothing. Sure, I hated Xantippe. Crazy planet with its cometary orbit and its unpredictable complex ecliptic. Xantippe had an enomous plot afoot. It was stalking us—even now it was ready to pounce on us, take us all and drain our minds—
I shook myself and snapped out of it. I was dreaming myself into a case of the purple willies. If I couldn’t keep my head on my shoulders about this spacegoing padded cell, then who would? Who else could?
The crew filed out, muttering. Parks sat on the pilot’s chair, watching them, his bright gaze flitting from face to face. When they had gone, he began to watch me. Not look at me. Watch me. It made me sore.
“Well?” he said after a time.
“Well what?” I barked, insubordinately.
“Aren’t you going to read your bedtime story? I am.”
“Bed—oh.” I slit the envelope, unfolded my orders. The captain did lik
ewise at the extreme opposite side of the chamber. I read:
“Orders by authority of the Solar League pertaining to course of action to be taken by Harl Ripley, astromechanic on Xantippean Expedition No. 1.
“Said Harl Ripley shall follow the rules and regulations as set forth in the naval regulations, up until such time as the ship engages the Xantippean Field. He is then to follow the orders of the master, except in case of the master’s removal from active duty from some unexpected cause. Should such an emergency arise, the command does not necessarily revert to said Harl Ripley, but to the crew member who with the greatest practicability outlines a plan for the following objective: The expedition is to land on Xantippe; if uninhabited, the planet is to be searched until the source of the field is found and destroyed. If inhabited, the procedure of the pro-tem commander must be dictated by events. He is to bear in mind, however, that the primary and only purpose of the expedition is to destroy the Xantippean Field.”
That ended the orders; but scrawled across the foot of the page was an almost illegible addendum: “Remember your last board meeting, Rip. And good luck!” The penciled initials were C. Renn, M. Ps. S. That would be Doc Renn.
I was so puzzled that my ears began to buzz. The government had apparently spent a huge pile of money in training us and outfitting the expedition. And yet our orders were as hazy as they could possibly be. And what was the idea of giving separate orders to each crew member? And such orders! “The procedure of the pro-tem commander must be dictated by events.” That’s what you’d call putting us on our own! It wasn’t like the crisp, detailed commands any navy man is used to. It was crazy.
Well, of course it was crazy, come to think of it. What else could you expect with this crew? I began to wish sincerely that the board had driven me nuts along with the rest of them.
I was at the chart table, coding up the hundred-hour log entry preparatory to slipping it into the printer, when I sensed someone behind me. The skipper, of course. He stayed there a long time, and I knew he was watching me.