by Andre Norton
The thing was complicated enough for a philosopher, let alone a two-bit space steward.
He went into Control and saw Captain Mace and the co-pilot, Lieutenant Washam, at the panel. He stepped to the galley to make coffee. He couldn’t get Eddington off his mind. The gaunt veteran was up to something, something troublesome, only Ben didn’t know exactly what to do about it.
He glanced through the plastibubble and looked at all the blackness of space, the pinpoints of stars. Worlds to conquer—the Jovian war had already brought about the development of photo-corpuscular power, and there were whispers that Space Force ships had made it beyond Pluto. A whole Universe to be met and grappled with—And here stood Ben Harlow, making coffee. He shook his head bitterly.
“Ben,” Captain Mace called abruptly. “You got a minute?”
“Yes, sir?” Ben looked up from the hot plate. Mace was beckoning. He went over to the panel as Lieutenant Washam, who was young and blond and very poised and correct, took over the controls.
Mace swiveled around in his chair. He was still grinning but his eyes were serious. “Ben, I don’t want you to worry, or anything like that—but you’d better know that a Viz came in from patrol headquarters a few minutes ago. So you can be ready to take care of the passengers, just in case.”
“What was the Viz about, Captain?”
Mace jerked his thumb at space in general. “Couple of Jovian fighters slipped in through Mars-inferior. That’s the report, anyway. The teledars are fingering for ’em now.”
Ben smiled dryly. “Be just my luck never even to get a look at a Jovian fighter.”
“You’d like to see a little action, huh?” Mace’s grin almost disappeared and he looked at Ben very steadily. “It’s no fun, Ben. Space-war is no fun at all.”
“I know that,” Ben said. “I can figure about how bad it is. Just the same—”
“Don’t ever look for it,” Mace said earnestly. “Don’t ever.”
Ben didn’t answer. He just looked back. Mace met his stare for a moment or so, then swung around to the controls again. Ben went back to the galley.
The transport roared through space. Its rockets flamed and the red disc of Mars behind it became a spot. Earth and Mars were degrees out of conjunction now and the ship cross-orbited. The bright, golden blob of the sun was to the left and had the usual illusory look of moving in a trajectory across the heavens.
After awhile Ben made supper, filled the first tray and pushed back into the passenger compartment with it. The group looked quiet enough, content enough. The four bridge players still sat cross-legged in the after portion. Several viewed minifilms in their laps. The Telenews man wrote silently on a small steno-machine. The beefy guards were smoking. Xyl, the Jovian prisoner, had his leg forms drawn up between his arms and sat with the guards, grinning at everybody and everything.
Eddington was on the edge of his bunk—on the very edge. He was glaring across the aisle at the Jovian. He moved only his fingers, resting them along the lock of his space-bag and drumming them steadily.
Ben frowned at him for a moment, then began to pass out the food. A dish and a knife and a fork to each man. No tasteless concentrates or synthetics on transport ships—this was a cushy job, a soft job. Out there in Interplan right now gaunt raw-nerved men were swearing because they had to live on pills.
Ben glanced back at Eddington every once in awhile. It was an instinct as much as anything that told Ben something wasn’t quite right—maybe it was just long subconscious understanding of human behavior in these surroundings. Anyway he felt compelled to do this.
That was how it happened that he saw Eddington open his space bag, lean forward, crouch and reach into it with his eyes still on the Jovian across the aisle.
Ben moved fast. He whirled, knocking his supper tray on a stanchion and spilling it all over a non-rated colonel with a clipped white mustache. He sprang down the aisle and across it. He still didn’t know exactly what Eddington was up to—he didn’t have to know exactly. The look in the man’s smoking eyes was enough.
He reached Eddington at about the time Eddington reached the Jovian. The thin spaceman had moved with hungry animal speed—too fast for the big space guards. They’d been staring out the ports, paying little attention, keyed only to move if the prisoner tried something funny. They weren’t expecting trouble from across the aisle, from one of their own guys.
Ben slammed into Eddington’s shoulder and knocked him aside. He remembered that in that moment a kind of insane laugh came from the Jovian.
Eddington found his balance again and turned and faced Ben. His eyes were wider. The lids had peeled back showing the dead-white cornea around the dark pupils. It seemed that his face was nothing but eyes.
He said to Ben, “Why, you lousy little rear-line punk!”
Ben looked at him quietly, looked at the thing in his hand and then back into his eyes again and said, “Take it easy, Eddington.” One of the space guards started to get up.
Ben said, “I’ll handle it.”
The space guard grunted and sat down again.
“One of these chicken-livered guys, huh?” Eddington said to Ben. “Love the Jovians. Love everybody. National be-kind-to-the-enemy week. Yeah, I know.”
“Eddington, you’d better sit down and take it easy,” said Ben. Eddington took a step forward. He dropped the thing in his hand, and it clattered on the floor. He said, “I know your kind, brother.”
“Careful, Eddington,” said Ben.
Eddington came at him, swinging. His left came first in a wide loop and Ben stepped inside of it. Ben wasn’t much of a boxer. He didn’t like fighting either. It choked him up inside and usually made him feel sick afterward.
But he lashed out just the same. He had to. It was his job. This thing happening right here, right now, was just an extension of his job. He felt his fist slam into Eddington’s midsection. He felt the force of the blow all the way up to his elbow.
Eddington whooshed with pain but his right was already on its way, following the left-handed swing Ben had caught on his shoulder. The right struck Ben’s cheek. Ben heard a sound—clok!—in his own head and for just an instant his vision blurred. But it was surprising how little actual pain there was to the blow. Maybe later it would hurt. Right now it seemed only annoying.
Meanwhile Eddington, face twisted with agony, was falling back from the punch to his middle. Ben swung an uppercut at the man’s sharp chin. It missed. Eddington saw him off balance and jabbed at his face. The jab smashed Ben’s lips against his teeth and his teeth cut the lips on the inside. But it didn’t blur things as the last one had. That midsection punch had taken something out of Eddington.
Ben braced himself and cocked his right fist as a man cocks a pistol for firing. He fired the fist at Eddington.
He knew the instant it landed that it would do the trick. There was that kind of a solid final sound to it. And the pain in his knuckles and up along his forearm was excruciating.
Eddington, quietly and without twitch or gesture, fell flat on his face.
Ben stared at his skinned knuckles. He held his right fist in his left hand and stood there for a moment, breathing hard. Then he looked around. The other passengers were still silent. They merely sat and stared at what had happened. No exclamations, no congratulations, no approval or disapproval, not even a whispered comment. Not much of a fight to them, Ben supposed. They had seen worse, much worse.
He heard the deep voice of one of the space guards. Speaking to the prisoner. “Sit down, you.”
He turned and looked and saw that Xyl had tried to get up. Xyl was staring at Ben. For just a passing instant it seemed to Ben that there was a kind of gratitude in the Jovian’s eyes. But that was impossible, he guessed. According to all the dope he’d ever heard, Jovians didn’t feel things like gratitude.
Ben lifted and then dropped his shoulders in something akin to a shrug. He looked down and saw. that Eddington was stirring, moaning. He stepped past Eddington, and
retrieved the thing he’d dropped. Then he moved forward again and stood with his legs spread and waited for consciousness to come back to the gaunt spaceman.
Eddington finally made it to his hands and knees. He rested like that with his face toward the floor. He shook his head and spat several times. Then he looked up and glared at Ben.
Ben said, “Don’t do it again, Eddington—do you hear me? Don’t do it again!”
Eddington blinked and didn’t answer. Ben turned to go forward. He’d need methiolate for those knuckle scratches and maybe Eddington could use some of the stuff in the first-aid kit, too.
He might behave after this or he might not—he was on the edge of a kind of madness, no question about that. The others, the guards especially, would keep a close eye on him now. But Ben still worried about it. It was his baby, this situation, and he worried about it.
He found the first-aid kit in the racks and tucked away the little souvenir he’d taken from Eddington. He turned and came back into the waist again. Eddington was back in his place. He was rubbing his jaw and looking rueful.
Ben got halfway down the aisle—
The space ship lurched suddenly and he was slammed to the left. When it lurched like that, too quickly for its artificial gravity to follow, something was wrong—very wrong. His shoulder and arm hit the bulkhead. The protruding knob of something stabbed him viciously. Hot pain went the length of his arm. And through it all he heard the sound of an explosion, of tearing metal.
Ben acted from his spine, not his brain. He didn’t stop to wonder exactly what had happened—in a broad way that was clear. This was an attack of some kind. The ship had been struck. He heard the air whoosh through the hole in the hull, disappear forever into space, and he began to feel the terrible cold.
He caught the screeching sound of the oxy-renewer forward, near the control deck. That would send enough atmosphere through the compartment to keep a man conscious a few seconds. The emergency heaters were already glowing, cutting into the dark cold of space. But they wouldn’t last forever either.
Ben turned and staggered again toward the forward part of the ship. The tremendous air pressure of the atmosphere from the oxy-renewer tried to shove him back. He squinted to protect his eyes from it and kept his stare on the plate-mesh switch, which was on the emergency panel just beside the control deck door.
Once he reached that switch they’d be safe—for a while, anyway. The hull of the ship was built in three layers and the middle layer consisted of a series of magnetic plates which moved automatically, when the switch was thrown to any aperture in the hull.
“Got to make it, got to make it!” he kept telling himself desperately, hypnotically. Sudden weariness bogged his feet, weakened his knees. It was getting colder. Things swam in his vision.
The ship was rocking and swerving in space. He could tell that by the way the artificial gravity lagged each change of direction-giving him a weird, floating, dreamlike sensation. Once lurching in a complete circle, he was able to glimpse the other passengers.
Two of the bridge players near the rear were missing—they’d been blown through the hole, probably. Now, frozen to the hardness of metal, they’d just keep traveling in space in their original direction. Forever, probably. Most of the others had been thrown about considerably. One of the big space guards was flat on his face, wedged between two piles of baggage.
The Telenews man had a twisted blood-soaked leg and sat there, staring at it stupidly. The Jovian prisoner, Xyl, was experiencing the only terror he knew—the fear of death. He was trying to flatten himself against the bulkhead.
Ben swung around again, nearly lost balance, recovered, then gave himself one tremendous push forward. He reached the panel.
His hand closed on the mesh switch—he lost consciousness just as he closed it.
He couldn’t have been out long. He was on his knees and his face was slumped against the bulkhead between the waist and control deck when he opened his eyes. He got up unsteadily. The air was tighter. The wailing of the oxy-renewer had stopped.
He turned. He put his shoulder blades and palms to the bulkhead. He stood there, panting, and his eyes took everything in. The passengers were milling about. Some were just recovering from anoxia. A few were muttering. Several were moaning. They were very confused.
“All right, back to your seats everybody,” Ben said.
They stared at him vaguely.
“I said back to your seats.”
He was a little startled at the firmness of his own voice. He was even more startled at how quickly they moved to obey.
They went back to their seats and then they sat there, staring at him. He pointed to the guard on the floor and to the Telenews man. “See what you can do. I’ll be back in a second with plasma.”
He stepped into Control. He stepped once more, forward—and then he stopped short. His eyebrows rose and without willing it he stepped back again.
Control was a shambles. Something—probably a nuclear shell—had come through the hull and exploded. Both Captain Mace and Lieutenant Washam were slumped over the panel. Mace’s red head was twisted at an angle no living head could possibly assume. The grin was still on it.
Mace’s hand rested on the panel, where it had fallen, on the mesh-switch. That explained why there was air and warmth in the Control room. Beside Mace, Lieutenant Washam was slumped back in his seat and his cropped blond head was split down the middle as though by an axe.
Ben felt sickness at his palate. He swallowed, and tried not to think about it.
He grabbed plasma from the racks and stumbled back into the passenger compartment. It seemed to him that he was now in more of a daze than he had been just before losing consciousness.
In the waist he took a deep breath and got to work. Some of the others were trying to move the guard who lay face down on the deck. He stopped that. He pushed them away and examined the man quickly and thoroughly.
He set up a plasma bottle, hung it on someone’s outstretched hand, inserted the needle. Then he moved quickly to the Telenews man. More plasma—and plenty of narcophine, too.
Funny, Ben thought, most of these combat boys knew first aid—knew it better than he did. Yet they’d been undecided—even a little stupid about the whole thing. Maybe it was the shock—maybe the suddenness of everything. Well, he couldn’t worry about that, now. He had something to tell them. This was going to be the toughest little speech of all.
He went forward and stood by the door to Control, and said, “May I have your attention, please.”
He flushed slightly as they all turned blank stares upon him. What a fool thing—what a stuffy thing to say! Anybody worth his salt, any real leader, would have used other words, another tone of voice. Ben didn’t know just what words or what tone—but he knew that he had been wrong.
Well, he had their attention.
He cleared his throat. He looked around. He was too embroiled within his own thoughts, his own doubts, really to see anything. He moistened his lips. “There’s been trouble in Control. Both of our pilots have been hit. They’re dead.”
Complete silence, still the blank stares.
Ben said, “Uh—” and then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Stoppage. He swallowed hard.
He said, “We seem to be all right for the time being. An attacking spaceship can’t possibly turn back for another pass before a matter of hours.” Sure, he was telling them. He’d never seen an attacking spaceship, not even the one that had just attacked. They had. They’d seen it all.
He kept talking with a kind of insane determination. “The problem is to land—somewhere, if we can’t make the Earth spaceport. We’ve got to get in somehow.”
Another long silence and then a scarred construction sergeant said in a croaking voice: “Okay. What do we do?”
The meaning of it didn’t hit Ben right away. The fact that one of the combat men had asked him what to do. Come to think of it it had sounded almost like sarcasm. Maybe, maybe not�
��Ben wasn’t sure.
He asked, “Anybody here know how to land a spaceship?”
They took their blank stares away from his this time and turned them upon each other. Several shook their heads. Two nuclear gunners faced each other and shrugged.
Ben’s eyes swung across the lot of them—and then landed on Xyl, the Jovian.
They stopped.
“You.”
Ben pointed at him.
Xyl had resumed man-shape again. Either he had quieted down by himself or the remaining guard had threatened him with an acid gun. He sat far back in the seat. He turned his expressionless eyes on Ben and his mushy voice, cast incongruously in a breezy space pilot’s idiom, sounded.
“What’s up? Why give me the big finger and the boiled eye, kid?”
“You’re a space pilot,” Ben said. “You can get us on course. And you can land this thing.”
Xyl threw back the blob of his head and laughed. When he brought his head down again, he had stopped laughing. His face was flaccid. “Do you think I’d get you stupid jerks out of a hole? When did I take out citizenship papers for planet number three? Don’t be silly.”
“Okay,” said Ben. “Suit yourself. Our rations will last maybe a week. You Jovians need food like anybody else. But even if we had food we’re off course and the chances are maybe a million to one we’ll hit Earth or any other planet. We’re in a fair way to be space derelicts. You know that, don’t you?”
Xyl thought it over. He gave no sign of thinking, such as cocking his head or frowning or squinting. But he was silent, clearly thinking it over. He looked up finally. He rose. The guard rose with him.
He said to Ben, “Come on kid, let’s take a look at the driver’s office.”
There was the messy business first of moving the bodies of Mace and Washam. Ben called others in to help. He noticed that they sprang pretty quickly when he called them—even the bird colonel with the clipped white mustache. He noticed that when they had finished doing something they looked to him for further instructions.