by William Tenn
Nothing incriminating had been found in the suitcase either; I had selected its contents with great care. Rather a nice touch that, choosing something old-fashioned like a suitcase instead of a modern space-saving collapsicon.
But if this mess got down to really sharp brass tacks, all my precautions wouldn't be worth a gram of plutonium in an atomic furnace. Damn Steggo anyway. Damn him and his mercantile sections. Damn Ragin. Damn the war.
I fell asleep in a wave of homesickness for Earth.
—|—
Weapons coughed brokenly at the stern of the ship. I came awake with my hand on the blusterbun. Somebody ran past my cabin screaming. The lights went off, came back on, then went off again.
I hit the floor of the bed as my pneumastic mattress was turned off too. Something rattled against the outside bulkhead and passed down the spaceship. Meteor dust? Not this far out. Probably Steggo turning on the gas sprinkler system. Or the mutineers.
So this was a mutiny. I had been in an atomic explosion and a devastating space negation in my time. I had been in the photonite plant on Rigel VIII when molecular joint lubricant was spilled against the dome, allowing our air to leak out into space. Now I was in a mutiny.
Fingers tapped on my door in a frantic message. I threw it open.
The man lying outside was evidently a crew member. He had a gaping, smoking hole instead of his chest.
"Jobal!" he almost whispered. "Please, please, Jobal—" He seemed to belch; when he didn't move I realized it was a death rattle. I moved his hand gently and closed the door. I went back to the side-board of the bed and sat down.
Who was Jobal? A friend? His wife, sweetheart? One of his gods? I must have sat in the darkness for an hour. After a while I noticed the ship was silent again. There was only the rolling hum of the Dendros.
Footsteps became louder and stopped outside my door. There was the sound of a man stepping over the body. Then the door was flung open and two huge Aldebaranians strode in. They leveled still-throbbing shmobbers at my waist.
"Captain Ragin wants to see you."
There. So the score was in. And now, I imagined, all bets were being paid. And which side was I supposed to be on? I walked carelessly to the door, keeping the pocket in which I had the blusterbun away from them.
Ragin sat in Steggo's chair. He didn't fill it as completely, but he looked just as dominant as the captain. Ballew pored over his charts in a corner. Except for the splash of blood on the floor, the room was as I had left it.
"Hello, Dr. Sims," Ragin grinned through puffed lips. Ballew didn't look up. "Some changes been made."
"For the better, I hope." I waited.
"Yeah. We think so." He looked behind me at my guards. "He's been searched?"
"Well—" one of them began.
"We didn't think—" the other fumbled.
"Great exploding novas! What do you blastheads think this is—a meeting of the Aldebaranian Benevolent Association?" He was on his feet snarling at them, his head almost two feet above mine.
"I can save you the trouble—er, Captain." I flipped the blusterbun from my pocket and held it out, butt foremost.
He stared uncomprehendingly at my outstretched hand for a few moments. Then he reached forward gingerly and took the invisible weapon.
A smile twisted his mouth as he ran his fingers over its intricacies. "Well, I'll be washed by a comet's tail! A blusterbun! Dainty and deadly. I've heard about these things but I never hoped to have one. How does a civilian rate it?"
"Naval research," I reminded him.
Coolly, he appraised me. "Maybe. Maybe not. I'll still have to have you searched." The guards came up.
I moved away. "Now, wait a moment. I gave you my weapon. Had I wanted to, I could have shot you with the same motion before your zombie friends decided to swallow or wipe their mouths. I carry documents on my person that I most definitely don't want seen until I reach Earth. Unless I'm mistaken, you want some favor of me. If you read those documents, all deals are automatically off; and you'll be in a mess about five times as disagreeable as a mutiny."
He took time to chew on that. Finally: "OK. Not that you can kill more than one man even if you have another weapon. If you start shooting, you'll be thoroughly butchered. And we do want a good deed out of you."
A tall, blonde woman came in with a tray. She prodded me with it. Catching on, I took a cup of hot liquid. Aldebaranian hialiau juice. Things were looking up.
"Elsa and I were just married. I wasn't going to leave her to what that fat sadist calls justice. The boys were all for mutiny thirty-six hours after we cleared Booma City, but I held them down until our wives were discovered. We've been miners and independent freightmen; we're not used to this sort of disciplinary guff."
My chin pointed at the red mess on the floor. "Steggo?"
"No. One of our boys. We've been careful to keep this a completely bloodless mutiny as far as the officers were concerned. As a result, there've been more casualties on our side than there should have been. We lost four men."
"Five," one of my guards broke in. "There was another stiff outside this guy's cabin. Couldn't see in the dark, but it felt like Rildek."
Ragin nodded. "Five, then. We'll have a roll call after we get the power turned back on. Running the ship on auxiliaries now. Now what I want you to do, doctor, is sign a document testifying to the background of the mutiny as you know it, as well as an affidavit stating that when last seen by you Steggo and his officers were all alive and in as good condition as could be expected."
"If I see them in that state, I will."
"You will. We're letting them go in a small lifeboat, with enough to last until they reach a base. If you want to, you may join them. This is a mutinous ship."
"No, thank you." I tried to sound casual. "I'll stay here."
He studied me. "I thought you'd say that. There's something terrifically phony about you, doctor, but I don't have time to figure it out."
I smiled. "I'm grateful for your lack of time." Then I put my cup on the floor. "But your word on this. I can take your word, because the fact you didn't kill Steggo and his officers indicates that you don't intend to turn pirate. Whatever your plans may be, will you tell me on your honor that you will see to it that I eventually reach Earth or Earth's authority?"
He pumped my hand in a pulverizing grip. "Word of honor. On my honor as a—a mutineer." We both grinned.
On the way to the airlock, the man behind me suddenly pushed his shmobber into my back. Startled, I stopped.
"My idea," Ragin said. "When Steggo reaches civilization, he'll tell the story his way. I want him to think you were detained aboard by force. It'll give your testimony more legality and protect you as well. I don't think you want to be investigated."
I thanked him. Quite a guy, this Ragin.
Ex-Captain Steggo, Chief Engineer Skandelli, and five other officers lay on the floor of the little lifeboat, restrainon yokes about their necks. The fat man glared up madly.
"Cast me adrift in a small boat, will you, Ragin? Well, I'll pull through somehow. I'll see you dissolving under the biggest thermons in the galactic navy!"
My guard bent over and spat in his face.
"You'll pull through, all right," Ragin said soberly. "You have twelve collapsicons containing every conceivable need." He smiled. "And after you we get rid of that unholy viscodium."
He made rapid adjustments on the restrainons, setting them to automatically turn off the binding lines of force within a half-hour. As he stooped over Skandelli, I noticed the chief was wearing a bandage over his chest.
"Do you want to make a little bet, fellow?" the engineer said softly. "I'll bet you my arms against your guts that before we're picked up you'll be warming a cot in a Terran prison."
Ragin smiled down at him. "Now that's no way to talk, Skandelli. After you locked yourself in the Dendros and gave my men all that trouble in blasting you out! Some of them had such nice plans for you; they'd just adore keeping you on
the Reward to play with."
Skandelli turned a creamy white and shut up.
"All set. Get ready to cast off. This guy," he indicated me, "stays with us. So does Ballew. They're hostages."
As the airlock closed, I heard Steggo's wild shriek, "Dr. Sims, we'll be back, we'll be back, we'll be—"
There was a whoosh as the lifeboat arced away.
Ballew typed the papers on the basis of Ragin's written notes. We were alone on the bridge. Obviously, we were trusted.
I looked at Ballew's sullen, pale face. He was young for an officer, even aboard a cargo ship. What was in this for him? I asked him.
"Oh, I don't know," he said, rolling the last sheet out of the machine. "I ran away to sea first because I'd read a lot of books. The great ancients: Conrad, London, Nordhoff and Hall. Then I read books about space—Mallard's Travels, Soose, Jon Iim. So I thought I was in too limited a medium and went to astrogation school. But space is as dull as the sea."
I clucked sympathetically and ran my fingers over the smooth finish of the chair. "Things generally are, to a romantic. And you expected to find something really interesting in a mutiny?"
He flushed and I remembered how he had looked when the captain had been roaring at him. "Nothing like that. I knew Ragin on Aldebaran VI—Nascor, that is—and I'd gone on a couple of hunting trips to Aldebaran XVIII with some of the other members of the crew. When I signed on as astrogator I told them of the crew shortage and they came a-running. I even helped them stow their wives aboard." He stared at me defiantly.
Of course, I nodded to show I thought this was no crime under the circumstances. The boy went on.
"I'd never traveled with Steggo before, but I'd heard of him. When he started to pull this mercantile section stuff, I told Rildek and Gonda—Gonda was the guy watching over you all the time—and they passed the word. Tore in here in the middle of the court martial and took over the ship. Steggo was planning to toss those guys and their women through an airlock!"
"Not a particularly nice thing to do, but the Fino Feminists did manage to wreck three squadrons at the beginning of the war. These men knew that women are strictly forbidden to be present on a ship without official escorts; why in the name of the Curvature did they bring them?"
He shrugged. "Well, they wanted to build a home in a system where every foot of ground wasn't worth its weight in galactic credits. Aldebaran is almost all ore and almost all staked out. The Solarian asteroids have become pretty cheap during the war; they thought they'd pool their capital and buy one. But the women had to come or they'd be spending half their capital on fares. Aldebaran-Sol is an expensive trip."
"Don't I know!" I read the stuff he had typed and signed it. "Now I imagine they plan to hole up on Otho or one of the obscure little suns near it."
The papers were tucked in the astrogator's desk. "Don't know where exactly, except that it must be an uninhabited system and preferably unexplored. You'll be set on a course for Sol. If the ship is found in good condition and no murders are committed, the affair doesn't come under the jurisdiction of the galactic navy, especially since it's being demobilized. And you know how much time the Aldebaranian Patrol will spend on a mutiny."
"About as much time as it takes to move the papers from the 'missing in space' to the 'wanted for mutiny' file. But you'll have trouble over women. Only seven of them."
"Maybe." He stretched, and the blue parplex tightened over a meager chest. "The galaxy is big and business will be hell-bent for expansion after the war. We'll always be able to slip off and get a job somewhere when things cool off."
Ragin came in heavily and thumbed through the charts. He selected one of them and studied it, swearing softly to himself.
Ballew looked at him inquiringly and continued. "Me, I have the satisfaction of helping my friends against a son of a bilge pump. I also get to know whether life on a desert planetoid is all it's cracked up to be."
"You'll get to know what a thermon tastes like," the tall man snarled suddenly. "Sol was this ship's original course, eh?"
The fair-haired kid had jumped to his feet. "Y-yes," he stuttered. "B-but I th-thought you could operate steering Dendros. I laid out a new course and all you had to do was steer to it."
"We can operate steering Dendros, all right." Ragin grimaced. "When they're steerable." His hand flashed up, holding emptiness. My blusterbun.
"After you, doctor. I hope for your sake you are a physical chemist."
I walked ahead of him to the engine room. He gestured me inside. I was not feeling exactly immortal just then.
There was a little bubble of men around the double mass of convoluted machinery in the center. The bubble disintegrated as we came up and I stared at the green transparency for two minutes before I understood.
"Skandelli!" I shouted. "That's what he meant by that threat in the lifeboat. And that's what I heard rushing by the outside bulkhead during the mutiny."
"Yeah. The rotten bushaleon holed up in here for an hour. One of the loading pipes runs under the floor plates to the storage tank. He blasted a piece out of it and as soon as the holding pressure went down far enough, the stuff came crawling out over the Dendros. Of course, it congealed faster than it could come out of the small opening, so at least the ship wasn't flooded. Not that it makes much difference to us."
I squatted and touched the cold stuff experimentally. Hard as dendraloid itself. "I'm afraid you're out of luck, Ragin. You can't steer with clogged Dendros, and if I know viscodium, you'll never get them unclogged. This ship goes to Sol."
"Maybe the ship does," he said easily. "But you don't."
Their set faces frightened me. "I have your word of honor! And I thought you were one man who wouldn't break it."
"I'm sorry, doctor, but this is one time when my word will have to be plumb disintegrated. We gave most of our high-neutron fuel to that bunch in the lifeboat and we couldn't hope to make an uninhabited system unless we brought the ship close to it first. If we get to Sol I might be able to cook up something like an atomic explosion to account for Steggo and his officers as well as the five crew members who were shmobbered off.
"Ballew will back me up. As an officer, his testimony will be useful. If we all tell our stories straight, and if Steggo hasn't been picked up yet, we might be able to get away with it. But you're an outsider; we could never take a chance on your suddenly remembering what your civics teacher said. No, you either unstick those Dendros or become our first planned corpse."
Sharp muzzles jabbed into my back. "But, Ragin—I'm a physical, not a mucilaginous chemist. Do you know what viscodium is? There's a joke in the student labs: what viscodium hath joined together, no man can put asunder. It takes on the physical properties of whatever it congeals around and dendraloid is the hardest substance in the galaxy. If you try to split the block, you split the Dendros, too. The manufacturers are still working on a softener. They warn people not to use the stuff unless they intend it to be permanent."
"Well, Dr. Sims, you better start inventing," the leader said over his shoulder. He paused at the exit hatch. "You have exactly three weeks, figuring on Terran time."
"No! Why don't you tell me the unit of liquid measure is the Sirian drom? Something I don't know, I mean." I wasn't being sarcastic; I was scared.
Three weeks to solve a problem that had the best men defeated. No lab and no equipment. And me, a neutronium specialist!
"Run down to the medicine chest and see if there's any scaralx aboard," I told one of my guards. It had proven effective in treatment of people suffering from viscodium cancer, the result of a liquid drop touching the skin.
The man tore out of the engine room. I found a morose satisfaction in the discovery that I would get cooperation.
He came back with a container of scaralx which said in large letters: DANGER! THIS COMPOUND IS TO BE TAKEN ONLY AS THE PHYSICIAN PRESCRIBES! DO NOT USE INTERNALLY.
I opened the container feverishly. There were five aspirin tablets and an eyedropper
inside.
—|—
Four days later, Ragin looked in on me on his daily tour of inspection. I had gotten around to using banked thermons. My eyes were red with fatigue. They let me go to my cabin whenever I wanted, but I hadn't been able to sleep. I was going to solve this problem and get to Earth in one piece, or I was going to burst my frontal lobe.
"How's it going, doc?" the big man asked.
"Not so good," I grunted. "I don't dare use too much juice for fear of melting the machinery. I've been trying to run it on an alternating current generator so that the heat is applied only to the surface in short bursts. But this stuff conducts too damn fast. I'll solve it somehow, though."
"Attaboy," he encouraged. "That's the old scientific spirit."
He wilted under my glare. "Sorry. I've no call to be funny. I wish those slobs—Steggo and Skandelli—were here. They'd have their mouths washed with viscodium, they would. Although," he considered, "they probably despise us just as much as we do them. You're the only innocent bystander."
The women, dressed in gay Aldebaranian frocks, were peering anxiously through the hatch. I thought of how much workable Dendros meant to them. After all, their claim was as just as mine.
"Forget it."
"You see," he explained anxiously, "this is a democracy we have here, a democracy of the purest kind because it's still close to the conditions which produced it. I'm only the leader; and even if I wanted to set you free because I trust you, the rest of the men can't feel that sure."
"I understand. You have a sound mind, Ragin. A pity only Solarians and Sagittarians are allowed in galactic government."
"Yeah. That's what I kept telling them."
Everybody laughed and tension dissolved. Gonda leaned over his shmobber and said to a neighbor: "See, what did I tell you—the doc is a good guy!"
The tall mutineer came over and stood at my side. Together we stared at the stubborn viscodium, green and immovable.