“Those seven lives you talk about, Walt,” he said, as acidly as he could, “weren’t lost in an attempt to make the rest of us rich, but to find living room for a world full of nations bursting at the seams and ready to explode into nuclear war. —And we aren’t exactly free-lance prospectors, either, but members of one of the armed services of a country who paid for the ship that brought us here and the very clothes we wore while coming.”
Out of the corners of his eyes he examined the faces of the other three in the office and thought he saw his words strike with good effect.
“We’re under orders—more specifically,” he went on, “everyone on this ship is under my orders. And my orders are that we keep faith with the world that sent us out by getting back to it as quickly as possible with the news of what we’ve found here.”
Even as Ben said it, the last sentence struck him as pompous, and to keep it from lingering in the ears of those he was talking to, he hastily scraped back his chair and got to his feet. Forced into it, the others rose also.
“That’s all, then,” he said. “Everybody get to work.” They filed out. As the door closed behind Coop, who was last to leave, Ben sat down in his chair behind the desk again. But barely a couple of minutes thought brought him to his feet once more.
He crossed his office and stepped out through the door into the corridor on the men’s side of the ship. There was no one in the corridor and all the staterooms were either empty or had closed doors. With the ship on surface, most of the off-duty people spent as much of their free time outside as possible. That was good. Any change from routine aboard ship was a cause for comment—and it was a change of routine for Ben to go calling on any crew member who was not sick or incapacitated.
He went down the corridor and knocked on Walt’s state-room door.
“Come in,” said Walt’s voice. Ben stepped through the door, closing it behind him. Walt was lying, fully clothed, on his back on his bunk. Like the Golden alien Ben had shot, stretched out Walt looked enormous, too big for the bunk he occupied.
“Ben,” said Walt, looking at him briefly and then looking back up at the curving underside of the ship’s hull, close above his face.
“I thought I ought to explain something,” said Ben, standing over him. “I didn’t mean to imply your suggestion of setting up residence here was completely reprehensible.” Even as he said the words, he hated himself for the lie implied in them, but too much was at stake hereto quibble over implied lies.
“Of course,” said Walt, without removing his gaze from the ceiling. “I understood.”
“It’s our duty to go back,” said Ben. “That commits us.”
“Yes,” said Walt
“If it wasn’t for that—but everyone aboard wants to get home.”
“Do you?” said Walt
“Why—yes,” said Ben. “Don’t you?"
“No,” answered Walt He was still watching the ceiling overhead. “I’ve had a number of years of the animals back there.” His voice was perfectly calm. “At least the animals we’ve had aboard the ship here are clean animals. Maybe if we started a new colony here with them, it’d stay a clean colony.”
Ben stood looking at him.
“I didn’t know you thought that way,” said Ben, at last.
“Didn’t you?” said Walt, without altering his voice or the direction of his gaze.
“No,” said Ben.
“That’s because you still think you can make something out of them,” said Walt. “Sooner or later you have to give that up. You make something beautiful for them and they take it out and use it to hit other animals over the head with. It’s no use—self-protection’s what you come to int he end. You’ll come to it, too.”
“No,” said Ben.
There was a moment of silence that grew longer and longer. Then Walt sighed.
“It’s too bad, Ben,” he said. “You were the one human being I knew.”
“Thank you,” said Ben. He reached back and put his hand on the knob of the stateroom door. “I’ll be going, then.”
“All right,” said Walt, closing his eyes. “Will you make sure that door latches when you close it? I’m going to take a little nap.”
“I will,” said Ben. He went out. Outside in the corridor, he stood for a moment, mentally running over a blueprint of the operating equipment of the ship. He turned and went back to his office. He unlocked the arms rack there, took down all the Weyerlander half-guns and locked them in the office safe. Then he went out through the door into the corridor on the women’s side of the ship.
He stepped off sixteen feet and stopped to examine the blank metal wall on his right, beyond which was the equipment of Calculation Section, and specifically the tape deck of the memory tank. All the other equipment in the Sections could be sabotaged only at the cost of making the phase ship permanently unable to shift. Deprived of the reels of tape in the memory tank, it could still shift—it just would not be able to find its way back to where it had been previously.
When they had changed the tape decks before shifting into the area of these worlds the Golden People had taken over, Lee had required several hours to dismantle the memory tank and get at the reels. But he had gone at it from inside the Computation Section. Someone bent only on destruction could cut or blow his way through this outer wall, and the tape decks would be the first part of the memory tank he would reach.
Of course the important tapes—the original ones with the records of their shifts out from Earth that would be needed to show them the way home—were still in his office safe. Ben turned, walked on down the corridor and turned in through the door opposite the lounge leading into Observation Section.
“Yes sir?” said Ralph Egan, looking up surprised. He was on duty alone here, with the ship grounded, and he had one of the cameras half-apart, working on it.
“You’re senior officer in Observation now, aren’t you?” said Ben, staring a little at him. The personality of Kirk Walish had so dominated this Section that Ben had forgotten who would replace him in authority here.
“Why, yes,” said Ralph, a little shadow crossing his thin, youngish face. It was remarkable how everyone missed Kirk, thought Ben. Sprocket, too, had left a hole in the atmosphere.
“Then I’ve got a question for you,” Ben said. “You’ll need the original tapes to find our way back to Earth—we all know that But even without them you could get closer to home than we are now—you could work us into the stellar neighborhood of the Sun, couldn’t you?”
“Well. . ." Ralph frowned. “It’d be a pretty big neighborhood.”
“But for example—?"
“Well,” said Ralph, wiping his hands on a waste cloth absent-mindedly. “We know we’re some sixteen thousand light-years in toward Galactic Center from the area where the Sun is. We could begin by moving out in a straight line, more or less, for sixteen thousand light-years and then trying to correct for what we estimate we made in movement off direct line to Galactic Center, during our trip in from Polaris. Oh, we could make a stab at it. But we couldn’t hope to come closer than a thousand light-years—unless some fantastic, lucky error happened to land us within viewing distance of the Sun. And the odds against that—” he hesitated, then gave up. “They’re impossible.”
“Never mind,” said Ben. “I want us to try it. This will be a chance to find out just how far we can go solely on observation and calculation. When you admit yourself stuck, I’ll break out the original tapes and we’ll calculate our way home from wherever we happen to be then. But let’s see how close we can come without them.”
Ralph’s face lit up with sudden enthusiasm for the idea. “Say,” he said, “that would be something to try, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ben. “I’ll see that everyone else is notified.” He turned and went up through the two other empty sections and back into his office. He closed the door to it behind him with a small measure of satisfaction. The tapes with the information that would alone bring them ho
me to Earth were secure, for the present at least, in his safe under lock and explosive booby trap. And the excitement of heading for home should make everyone on board unresponsive to any suggestion by Walt that they do anything else, for the present.
At the same time he did not underestimate Walt Theman’s mind was such that it was literally impossible to estimate in advance what he might do. Nor would a lack of courage make him hesitate in carrying out whatever decision he might make. Now that it was too late, Ben thought of a hundred different indications, small things said or done by Walt, that should have been warnings that Walt was slipping over the mental line. It was plain that Walt’s loneliness and differences from ordinary people had become, by tiny degrees, a mania. Ben had recognized the possibility of such a slipping in himself, on occasion, when long hours of work and insufficient sleep had filled the world with a gray fog of fatigue.
He should never have allowed Walt to be one of those aboard the phase ship when he tricked it and its crew off the surface of Earth. Subjecting Walt to this final strain had probably been the straw to break the camel’s back of his sanity. Unsparingly, Ben reproached himself. In the final analysis he, himself, was responsible.
But as the ship finally lifted two days later and began shifting homeward, it was without any sign of trouble from Walt. The enthusiasm of everyone on being headed back to Earth, the excitement of seeing how close to it they could come without having to fall back on the tapes of the voyage out—these things together made a climate in which trouble was not likely to flourish.
Experimentally, they began by shifting directly outward from Galactic Center for sixteen thousand light-years to a theoretical point referred to as Estimate Earth. When they had finally corrected down their shifts to arrive at that particular destination, they found as they had expected nothing but empty space, surrounded by an unfamiliar wilderness of stars. From then on they began a three-dimensional—actually four-dimensional if you included the temporal involvement of star movements—version of a standard spiral search pattern. The three-dimensional version could be likened to the winding up of a length of string into a ball where the thickness of the string was the sphere of “observable” space, close to a hundred light-years in diameter with the phase ship at its center, within which the Sun or some other familiar star could be positively identified by the instruments in Observation.
They proceeded in shifts equal to the radius of their observable space, or for fifty light-years at a time. This was equal to half the diameter of the string, and progress was slow for all that. Expressed in miles—the figures they dealt with were huge. But the fact that their chances of finding a familiar star by this method were almost no chance at all gave some indication of the size of space itself. Nevertheless, it was interesting and instructive to try.
Sooner or later if phase ships began to move between the stars in any numbers, thought Ben, methods of location and navigation would have to be developed that did not require the memory tanks—though these would probably always be useful.
But meanwhile, those aboard the ship were becoming restive. The human like his draft animal, the horse, tends to become more eager to be home the closer he approaches his dwelling place. The day came when Ben sat alone in his office, frowning at the latest estimate of the search pattern’s progress during the next five-day period before him. Ralph Egan’s opinion was that the Sun of Earth was within less than a thousand light-years of them—but it could be within less than five hundred light-years and they could search this way for the rest of their lifetimes without finding it. On the other hand, they could feed the route they had taken since replacing tapes to Computation, replace the new tapes with the original ones with their data, and the phase ship would be home in less than three days, and possibly as little time as ten hours.
But putting the original tapes in the memory tank would make them vulnerable to destruction by Walt. It was the tapes, Ben was sure, that Walt’s overstrained mind had fastened on as a means of stopping the phase ship from returning to Earth. Once in the tank, a quarter-inch corridor panel of aluminum alloy would not protect them; and with the original tapes destroyed, they would be left with the replacement tapes and no place to go but back to the worlds of the Golden People.
Ben drummed with his finger tips on the desk top. He could arbitrarily arrest Walt and order him confined until they landed on Earth. But then he would either have to give the crew his reason that he believed Walt was mentally unbalanced or refuse to give any reason at all. Either course would look strange to the rest of the crew, and Walt had probably already made plans to turn any such unusual behavior on Ben’s part to his advantage. Ben remembered how Walt had always been obeyed by the others aboard in spite of the fact he made no great effort at command. There was something about Walt’s sheer contempt and indifference to whether he was believed or not that made his lightest statement sound like gospel.
What if he tried to confine Walt and Walt claimed that it was Ben who was going insane and this desire to lock up Walt proved it? Faced with a choice, the crew would of course obey their true commander—or would they? Nora was not the only one who had at times spoken to Ben about getting more sleep. Harmless warnings, but—the point was, thought Ben drumming restlessly on his desk top again, in dealing with Walt, he had to assume that Walt could out-think him—had already out-thought him.
The conversation that day in Walt’s cabin had been, innocent as it sounded, a declaration of war. Ben knew enough about Walt to understand that. Walt had made plans to keep them from ever going back to Earth; and as long as Ben did not know what they were, he could not take the chance of exposing the tape decks that alone could get them home.
He had put things off this long with the attempt to navigate home without the taped information, hoping that some stroke of luck, some miracle would intervene. But now time had run out.
He got up, went over to the safe, and opened it. Inside were the racked rifles, the pile of half-guns from the office rack, and in a corner, the filing cabinet that held the booby-trapped tape decks. He turned to the bottom of the rifle rack, opened a drawer there, took out a short-barreled .38caliber revolver, and loaded its six chambers.
He put the revolver into his pocket, left and locked the safe, and went across from his office to the dispensary to take a hypodermic syringe from one of the glass-fronted cabinets in the drug room. He filled the syringe from a small, clear-glass container of sodium pentothal and carried them both back into his office. He laid syringe and container on top of his desk. He took the gun from his pocket and laid it beside them. After a second, he changed his mind, took the revolver, and put it down in the lowest right-hand drawer of his desk—but left the drawer open.
He sat down at his desk, punched the intercom to connect him with the Sections where Walt was on duty, and spoke.
“Captain Bone?”
There was a slight pause and then the steady tones of Walt’s voice answered.
“Yes sir?”
Ben paused. The sound of his voice from the intercom in front of Walt would be reaching the ears of all those on duty in the three Sections. There would be no hushing up what Ben intended to do so far as the phase ship was concerned.
“I’m going to have the tapes now in the memory bank replaced with the original deck,” said Ben, “so that the ship can proceed home from here as quickly as possible. Will you put a stop to the search pattern, call Captain Ruiz to take over in Sections and begin work on the memory bank, and come here to my office, yourself, to help me get the tape decks from the safe?”
There was the slightest of hesitations.
“Right away, sir,” said Walt. Ben let go of the key under his forefinger and the intercom connection was broken.
Ben waited. More than a minute or two went by—and then there was a knock, not at the door from Control Section, but from the corridor door on the men’s side of the ship.
“Come in,” said Ben.
Walt opened the door and stepped inside, c
losing the door behind him. Standing with his back to the door, he loomed in the small office in his white coveralls, his long arms hanging relaxed on either side of him in, their loose sleeves, the powerful fingers of the left hand slightly flexed, those of the right half-curled, with the broad back of that hand toward Ben. Ben stood up behind the desk.
“Walt,” he said, “Before I take the tapes out of the safe, I’m going to give you an injection, and I want you to go back into my bedroom here and lie down on the bed. The injection will make you sleep and I’ll give you others in the next ten hours to three days it takes us to get back and down on the surface of Earth.”
He stopped speaking. Walt looked back at him Calmly, but without stirring from his position by the door.
“That’s an order, Walt,” said Ben. He found himself staring at the still face before him. It seemed completely sane, completely unchanged. It was incredible that this man that Ben had known over the years could have altered so much without showing the smallest sign of it. It seemed unthinkable that it should not be possible, even now, to reason with Walt—to talk him back from that far, high, bitter land into which he had wandered, from which all other men and women looked like animals. For a moment, Ben felt doubt sweeping him. Perhaps he had been wrong about Walt from the moment they stood facing each other, holding guns, on the Golden People’s world.
Walt’s lips twisted suddenly in a small, wry smile.
“All right, Ben,” he said. “If you want me to.”
Ben felt the breath leak out of him in relief—and for the first time became conscious of the fact that he had been holding it.
“Good—” he began, glancing down at the desk top as he reached out to pick up the hypodermic syringe. A flicker of movement, seen out of the corner of his eye, made him look up.
Walt’s feet had not moved, but he was flinging his right arm outward and upward toward Ben. Sliding out of the sleeve of that arm like a hidden knife into the hand of a knife-thrower was the slim length of one of the javelin weapons of the Golden People.
Mission to Universe Page 18