“It fits,” said Hereford sorrowfully.
“Good. Now, knowing Jovians—and learning more every day, by the way—I conclude that they gave us the drive, not because they had something better, but because it had already served its purpose for them. I am convinced that Jovian camouflage boats are on the way to the Invader now—and perhaps they have even … but I’d rather not think about that.” He spread his arms, dropped them. “Hence our little jaunt. We’ve got to get there first. If we’re not first, we have to do what we can when we get there.”
The boat, lightless, undriven, drifted toward the Invader. At this arc of the chosen ellipse, its velocity was low, and suspense was as ubiquitous a thing as the susurrus of the camouflage unit which whispered away back aft. Hereford and Belter found themselves talking in whispers too, as if their tense voices could carry through those insulated bulkheads, across the dim void to the mysterious crew of the metal murderer which hung before them.
“We’re well inside his meteor deflectors,” gritted Belter. “I don’t know what to think. Are we really going to be able to get to him, or is he playing with us?”
“He doesn’t play,” said Hereford grimly. “You will excuse the layman’s question, but I don’t understand how there can be a possibility of his having no detector for just this kind of approach. Since he uses bombs camouflaged the way we are, he must have some defense against them.”
“His defense seems to be in the range of his deflectors,” answered the chairman. “Those bombs were hunters. That is, they followed the target wherever it moved. The defense would be to stall off the bomb by maneuvering until it ran out of fuel, like the one we picked up. Then his meteor-repellers would take care of it.”
“It was obviously the most effective weapon in his arsenal,” said Hereford hopefully.
“As far as we know,” said Belter from the other end of the emotional spectrum. Then, “I can’t stand this. I’m going to try a little drive. I feel as if we’d been hanging here since nuclear power was discovered.”
Hereford tensed, then nodded in the dark. The boat was hardly the last word in comfort. The two men could lie prone, or get up to a cramped all-four position. Sitting was possible if the cheekbones were kept between the knees and the occipital bones tight against the overhead. They had been in that prison for more days than they cared to recall.
Belter palmed the drive control and moved it forward. There was no additional sound from the power unit, but the slight accelerative surge was distinctly felt.
“I’m going to circle him. No point being too careful. If he hasn’t taken a crack at us by this time, I don’t think he’s going to.” He took the steering lever in his other hand and the boat’s nose pulled “up” in relation to the Invader’s keel-plane. There was no fear of momentum-damage; the controls would not respond to anything greater than a 5-G turn without a special adjustment.
Within four hours the craft was “over” the alien. The ugly, blind-looking shape, portless and jetless, was infuriating. It went its way completely unheeding, completely confident. Belter had a mad flashback to a childish romance. She hadn’t been a very pretty girl, but to have her near him drove him nearly insane. It was because of her perfect poise, her mask. He did not want her. He wanted only to break that calm, to smash his way into the citadel of her savoir faire. He had felt like that, and she was not evil. This ship, now—it was completely so. There was something unalive, implacable, inescapable about this great murderous vessel.
Something clutched his arm. He started violently, bumped his head on the overhead, his hand closing on the velocity control. The craft checked itself and he bumped his head again on the forward port. He swore more violently than Hereford’s grip on his arm called for, and said in irritation: “What?”
“A—hole. A hatch or something. Look.”
It was a black shadow on the curve of the gray-shadowed hull. “Yes … yes. Shall we—” Belter swallowed and tried again. “Shall we walk into his parlor?”
“Yes. Ah … Belter—”
“Hm-m-m?”
“Before we do—you might as well tell me. Why did you want me to come?”
“Because you’re a fighting man.”
“That’s an odd joke.”
“It is not. You have had to fight every inch of the way, Hereford.”
“Perhaps so. But don’t tell me you brought me along for the potential use of my mislaid pugnacities.”
“Not for them, friend. Because of them. You want the Invader destroyed, for the good of the System. I want it saved, for the good of the System, as I see it. You could achieve your end in one of two ways. You could do it through Peace Amalgamated, back at Central. It would only need a few words to obstruct this whole program. Or, you could achieve it yourself, here. I brought you to keep you from speaking to Peace Amalgamated. I think having you here where I can watch you is less of a risk to the procurement of the Death defense.”
“You’re a calculating devil,” said Hereford, his voice registering something between anger and admiration. “And suppose I try to destroy the ship—given, of course, the chance?”
“I’d kill you first,” said Belter with utter sincerity.
“Has it occurred to you that I might try the same thing, with the same amount of conviction?”
“It has,” Belter replied promptly. “Only you wouldn’t do it. You could not be driven to killing. Hereford, you pick the oddest times to indulge in dialectics.”
“Not at all,” said Hereford good-humoredly. “One likes to know where one stands.”
Belter gave himself over to his controls. In the back of his mind was a whirling ball of panic. Suppose the power plant should fail, for example. Or suppose the Invader should send out a questing beam of a frequency which the camouflage unit could not handle. How about the meteor deflector? Would they be crushed if the ship located them and hurled them away with a repeller? He thought with sudden horror of the close-set wiring in the boat. Shorts do happen, and sometimes oxidation and vibration play strange tricks with wiring. Do something, his inner voice shouted. Right or wrong, do something.
They drifted up to the great silver hull, and the hole seemed to open hungrily to them as they neared it. Belter all but stopped the craft in relation to the ship, and nosed it forward with a view to entering the hatch without touching the sides.
“In the visirecord, didn’t the camouflage disrupter at Outpost show up for a moment on the screen as it left the ship?” Hereford whispered.
“Yeah. So what? Oh! You mean the cam unit was shut off until the bomb was clear of the ship. You have something there, Hereford. Maybe we’d better shut it off before we go in. I can see where it would act like something less than camouflage, enclosed in a metal chamber and reradiating all the stray stuff in there plus the reflections of its own output.” He put his hand out to the camouflage control. “But I’m going to wait until we’re practically inside. I don’t relish the idea of being flung off like a meteorite.”
Handling the controls with infinite care, touching them briefly and swiftly with his fingertips, Belter tooled the boat through the hatch. He switched off the camouflage effect and had the boat fully inboard of the Invader before he realized he was biting his tongue.
Surprisingly, the chamber they entered was illuminated. The light was dim, shadowless, and a sickly green. The overhead and bulkheads themselves, or a coating on them, accounted for the light. There was a large rack on the forward partition containing row on row of the disruption bombs, minus their warheads. Above each ended a monorail device which ran to a track ending in a solid-looking square door—obviously the storage space for the warheads. Another hoist and monorail system connected the hulls themselves with the open hatch. This trackage, and the fact that the chamber was otherwise untenanted, indicated that the bomb assembly, fuse setting, and dispatching were completely automatic.
“Camouflage again,” gritted Belter. “This boat is enough like those bombs to fit sort of cozily in one of
those racks. In this crazy light no one would notice it.”
“This light is probably not crazy to those on board,” said Hereford.
“We’ll worry about that later. Slip into your suit.”
From the after locker they drew the light pressure suits around themselves and secured them. Belter demonstrated the few controls—oxygen, humidity, temperature, magnetism, and gravity, to be quite sure the old man was familiar with them all. “And this is the radio. I think it will be safe to use the receivers. But don’t transmit unless it’s absolutely necessary. If we stick close together we can talk by conduction—touching our helmets.”
It was the work of only a few minutes to grapple the weightless craft into the rack. It was a fair fit. When they had finished, Belter reached in and took out two blasters. He secured the escape hatch and turned to Hereford, handing him one of the guns. Hereford took it, but leaned forward to touch his transparent helmet to Belter’s. His voice came through hollowly but clearly.
“What’s this for?”
“Morale,” said Belter briefly. “You don’t have to use it. If we’re watched, ‘Two armed men’ sounds better than ‘Two men, one armed.’ ”
They groped to the inboard partition and followed it cautiously aft. The touch of the metal under his gloves brought a shocking realization to Belter of where he actually was, and for a moment his knees threatened to give way. Deep inside him, his objective self watched, shaking its figment of a head in amazement. Because he had secured a lifeboat equipped for the job, he had come. Because he had gotten inside the Invader’s screens, he had approached the ship itself. Because he was close enough and a hatch was open, he had come in. Just the way I got into the Army, and the way I got into politics, he grinned.
They found a ladder. It led upward through a diamond-shaped opening in the overhead. The rungs were welded to the bulkhead. They were too narrow and too close together. There were dragging scuffmarks on each side, about eighteen or twenty centimeters on each side of the rungs. What manner of creature ambulated on its centerline, dragging its sides?
A Jovian.
He looked at Hereford, who was pointing at the marks, so he knew that Hereford understood, too. He shrugged and pointed upward, beckoning. They went up, Belter leading.
They found themselves in a corridor, too low to allow them to stand upright. It was triangular in cross-section, with the point down and widened to a narrow catwalk. A wear-plate was set into each side and bore the same smooth scuffs. The deck, what there was of it between the sharply sloping sides, was composed of transverse rods. A creature which could grip with claws and steady itself with the sides of a carapace could move quite freely in such a corridor regardless of gravitic or accelerative effects, within reason.
“Damn!”
Belter jumped as if stabbed. Hereford tottered on his magna-grips and clutched at the slanted bulkhead for support. The single syllable had roared at them from inside their helmets. The effect was such that Belter all but swallowed his tongue. He pointed at himself in the dim green light and shook his head. Hereford weakly followed suit. Neither of them had spoken.
“Lousy Jovians—”
Belter, following a sudden hunch, laid his hand on Hereford’s shoulder to suggest that he stay put, and crept back to the bomb bay opening. He lay down, and cautiously put his head over the lip.
A long, impossibly black something was edging across the deck down there. Belter squeezed his eyes tightly closed and opened them wide, trying to see through the foggy green radiance. At last, he discerned a small figure pulling and hauling at the shadow, the bomb, the … the lifeboat.
A human figure. A man. A man who must have come through the Invader’s defenses, even as he had. A man with a camouflaged boat.
But no one except a few Techs even knew that the boats had been completed. And the Council, of course.
The man below reached inside his boat and touched a control. It sank down to the deck next to the bomb rack as its magnetic anchors were activated. The man shut the escape hatch and shuffled toward the inboard partition, his blaster in hand, his head turning as he came.
Belter watched him until he discovered the ladder. Then he scrambled to his feet and, as fast as the peculiar footing would allow him, he scurried back to Hereford. His helmet receiver registered an angry gust of breath as the man below saw the short-paced ladder and the scuffmarks.
Belter slammed his helmet against Hereford’s. “It’s a Martian,” he gritted. “You might know it’d be a blasted Martian. Only a Martian’d be stupid enough to try to climb aboard this wagon.”
He saw Hereford’s eyebrow go up at this, but the peace-man did not make the obvious comment. He was silent as he followed Belter forward to the nearest turn in the corridor. They slipped around it, Belter conning its extension carefully. There was still, incredibly, no sign of life.
Just around the turn there was a triangular door, set flush into the slanted wall. Belter hesitated, then pressed it. It did not yield. He scrabbled frantically over its surface, found no control of any kind. Hereford grasped his arm, checked him, and when Belter stepped back, the old man went to his knees and began feeling around on the catwalk floor. The door slid silently back.
Belter slipped in, glanced around. But for a huddled, unmoving mass of some tattered matter in the corridor, there was nothing in the room, which was small. Belter waved the old man in. Hereford hopped over the sill, felt on the floor again, and the panel slid shut.
“How did you know how to open that door?” he asked when their helmets touched.
“Their feet … claws … what-have-you … are obviously prehensile or they wouldn’t have floors that are nothing more than close-set rungs. Obviously their door handles would be in the floor.”
Belter shook his head admiringly. “See what happens when a man thinks for a living?” He turned to the door, set his head against it. Very faintly, he could hear the cautious steps of the Martian. He turned back to Hereford. “I suppose I ought to go out there and pin his ears back. Martians have nothing in their heads but muscles. He’ll walk right up to the skipper of this ship if he has to wade through the crew to do it. But I’m mighty interested in just what he’s up to. We couldn’t be much worse off than we are. Do you suppose we could follow him close enough to keep him out of trouble?”
“There is no need for caution,” said Hereford, and his voice, distorted by the helmets, was like a distant tolling bell.
“What do you mean?”
Hereford pointed to the huddled mass in the corner. Belter crossed to it, knelt, and put out a hand. Frozen substance crumbled under his touch in a way which was familiar to him. He shrank back in horror.
“It’s—dead,” he whispered.
Hereford touched helmets. “What?”
“It’s dead,” said Belter dully. “It’s—homogenized, and frozen.”
“I know. Remember the three Jovian capital ships?”
“They couldn’t stand The Death,” Belter murmured. “They opened all the locks.”
He stood up. “Let’s go get that fool of a Martian.”
They left the room and followed the corridor to its end. There was another ladder there. They climbed it, and at the top Belter paused. “I think we’d better try for the control central. That’ll be the first thing he’ll go after.”
They found it, eventually, before the Martian did, possibly because they were not being as cautious. They must have passed him en route, but such was the maze of corridors and connecting rooms that that was not surprising. They still eschewed the use of their transmitters, since Belter preferred to find out exactly what the Martian was up to.
They had just opened a sliding door at the end of a passageway, and Belter was half through it when he stopped so suddenly that Hereford collided with him.
The room which spread before them was unexpectedly large. The bulkheads were studded with diamond-shaped indicators, and above them and over the ceiling were softly-colored murals. They glowed an
d shimmered, and since they were the first departure from the ubiquitous dim green, their immediate effect was shocking.
In the center of the chamber was a pair of control desks, a V pointing forward and a V pointing aft, forming another of the repeated diamond forms. There was a passage space, however, between the two V’s. In their enclosure was a creature, crouching over the controls.
It was alive.
It stirred, heaving itself up off the raised portion of the deck on which it lay. It was completely enclosed in a transparent, obviously pressurized garment. As it rose, Belter and Hereford shrank back out of sight. Belter drew his blaster.
But the creature was apparently not aware of them. It turned slowly to face the opposite corner of the room, and the sensory organ on its cephalothorax blushed pink.
There was a bold clanking from the corner of the room, which Belter felt through his shoes. Then the wall began to glow. A small section of it shone red which paled into white. It bellied momentarily, and then sagged molten. The Martian, blaster in hand, leapt through the opening. And he could have opened that door, thought Belter disgustedly. Why does a Martian always have to do it the hard way?
The Martian stopped dead when he was clear of the simmering entrance. He visibly recoiled from the sudden apparition of color, and stood awed before those magnificent murals. His gaze dropped to the center of the room.
“So there is a defense,” he snarled. His transmitter was still blatantly operating. “Come on, Jupiter. I was wise to this whole stunt. Who did you think you fooled by poisoning your own forces on Titan? Invader, huh? Some stuff! Get out of there. Move now! I know you can understand me. I want to see that Death defense and the controls. And there’s no sense trying to call your buddies. I’ve seen them all over the ship. All dead. Something saved you, and I mean to find out what it is.”
He raised his blaster. The Jovian quivered. Belter crossed his left arm across his body and grasped the edge of the door. He rested his blaster across his left forearm and squinted down the barrel. Hereford reached over his shoulder and drew the muzzle upward.
Thunder and Roses Page 36