“That makes sense,” Rand told the computer. “But there’s important cargo down there. There may even be some live human beings. Can you tell me if the radon has reached the storage hold?”
“The storage hold is not yet affected by the spread of radon.”
“Okay, then. This shaft will take me straight there, won’t it? If there’s no radon here, and none there, then it won’t do any harm to open the hatch. Right?”
“All connecting hatches must remain sealed.”
Arguing like this with the computer made him angry. “Listen, you dumb machine. I just explained to you why it’s safe to open this hatch! Open it up!”
“Is that a direct order?”
“It sure is,” Rand yelled.
“Direct orders can be accepted only from officers of the ship.”
“All the officers are dead. You told me so yourself.” Rand pounded his fists on the hatch in fury. Then an idea struck him. “Since the officers are dead, command of the ship goes to the civilian who knows most about running a spaceship. That’s me. I’m your new captain. I order you to open this hatch. If you say no once more, it’ll be mutiny!”
The computer’s highly logical mind thought that over for a moment. Then it said, “The order is accepted.”
“Thank you,” Rand said sarcastically, as the hatch swung open.
CHAPTER 3
THERE WAS less smoke in the service shaft than there was in the hall. Rand was glad to breathe some more-or-less fresh air again. He climbed into the shaft and the hatch closed behind him.
Metal rungs lined the wall of the shaft. Rand scrambled down rung by rung to the level where the storage holds were located. The hatch here was sealed too, of course.
One of the computer’s scanning pickups was mounted over the hatch. “This is Captain Rand,” he said to it. “Open up, fast!”
The hatch opened. Rand jumped through, into the passageway.
There was plenty of smoke here, too. He looked around, trying to find the storage hold. He had never been down in the storage level before, and he didn’t know his way around. But the doors here were numbered in the high thirties. The storage hold must be far down the passage, near the damaged end of the ship.
It was hard to see with all the smoke in the air.
He knew he didn’t have much time. He started to trot.
A huge figure appeared suddenly out of the dimness ahead and blocked Rand’s way. The big man put up one gigantic arm like a traffic cop telling a motorist to halt.
“Where you think you going, fella?”
“Get out of my way, will you?” Rand said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Well, slow down. There ain’t nothing down there you need to see,” the big man rumbled.
He looked more like a gorilla than a man. He was at least half a foot taller than Rand, and Rand wasn’t small. His clothes were torn and stained with grease. His face and his thick red hair were blackened by smoke. He didn’t seem to have shaved in a month. Beads of sweat ran down into his bright blue eyes.
The big man was a deckhand, one of the crewmen who did the dirty jobs in the engine room. Jetmonkeys, they were called. You didn’t need much brain to be a jetmonkey, only lots of muscle. But this one was no monkey. He was more like an ape.
It figures, Rand thought, that this rockhead would be the only survivor of the engine crew. Just a big hunk of walking meat that hardly rates as a human being.
The man kept his hand pressed casually against Rand’s chest, holding him back.
“I told you I’m in a hurry,” Rand said again. He grabbed the other man’s thick wrist with both his hands and tried to wrench it away. But the jet-monkey’s arm didn’t budge.
“You ain’t in any hurry, mac, really, you ain’t,” the jetmonkey said. “You can’t go but twenty feet more thisaway. Look, I just come from there myself.”
“What do you mean, twenty feet?”
The jetmonkey shrugged. “The red wall’s down, thisaway. You can’t get past that nohow. So why knock yourself out trying?”
The red wall?
That topped it, Rand thought. That was the chocolate frosting on the cake.
The red wall was ship slang for the radiation shields that were hidden every fifty feet or so in all the passageways. In case hard radiation was spreading through some part of the ship, the red wall would come down to protect the other part.
The computer must have lowered the red wall here a couple of minutes ago, while Rand was scrambling down the shaft. It meant that the deadly radon had reached the storage hold. Anything on the far side of that wall — including of course the drug cargo — was hopelessly hot from a bath of hard radiation.
Rand knew that he could probably make the computer lift the red wall, just as he had made the computer open the hatches. But what for? He’d never come out of the hold alive.
Shoulders slumping in defeat, he turned away. His rescue mission was a total failure. He hadn’t been able to save Professor Loder, and he hadn’t succeeded in getting the drugs. The overdrive blowup had destroyed everything of value, then.
The jetmonkey looked cheerful, though. He grinned and said, “Hey, smile, mac? You look all used up!”
“I feel all used up.”
“Why you so gloomy? You ain’t dead, are you?”
Rand shook his head angrily. “I might as well be,” he said in a low voice. “Might as well.”
“Hey? What kinda dumb talk is that?” The big man punched Rand cheerfully. “Come on, mac — let’s you and me go find a lifeship and clear outa here. I got a feeling the whole place is goin’ to blow.”
Rand nodded wearily. “All right, let’s go find a lifeship. But first we’ve got to hunt for survivors.” He pointed down the smoke-filled corridor. “Anybody else alive down there?”
“That’s pretty funny,” the jetmonkey said. “Tell me another joke, now.”
“The whole crew’s dead, then?”
“All but me, looks like. I always knew I was a lucky one. When the drive blew, I was down back getting some new fuel rods. I heard a big bang and came out for a look. Boom! No engine room! The whole thing gone! Boom!”
“Killed everyone at once?”
“Don’t know about killed, but they sure weren’t there no more! Except a few, anyway. And they weren’t looking so good. I woulda brought them out, but there wasn’t no sense in it. Not much left of them, you know?”
They reached the hatch of the service shaft. The jetmonkey tried to pull it open, but it stayed shut.
Rand looked up at the computer’s scanner pickup and said, “This is Captain Rand. Open up!”
The hatch opened. The jetmonkey looked at Rand in amazement.
“Captain Rand?” he said. “You ain’t really the captain, are you?”
Rand managed to smile. “Does this look like a uniform I’m wearing? The captain’s dead. So are all the other officers. I got the computer to believe I was the new captain, so it would obey my orders.”
“Hey, pretty nice going! You got to be smart to think faster than them brains! Glad to know you, Captain Rand!”
“Rand’s enough. What’s your name?”
“Dombey,” the jetmonkey said. “Bill Dombey.”
“Okay, Dombey, let’s go find survivors.” Rand made a gloomy face. “I know of at least one. A character named Leswick. He’s no bargain, but I guess we ought to rescue him.”
Rand led the way up the hatch and back to the cabin level. The smoke was thicker than ever up there, now.
“Leswick!” he yelled. “Where are you, Leswick?”
“Near Cabin Five,” came the faint voice of the Metaphysical Synthesist. “Someone’s alive down here!”
“We’re coming,” Rand called.
He and Dombey stumbled through the smoke. Soon the figure of Leswick could dimly be seen. The philosopher was standing over someone who was covered with blood.
Leswick glanced up. “It’s that businessman from the Mars Colony. He’s
badly hurt, but maybe he’ll pull through. We can carry him to the lifeship —”
“Wait,” Rand said.
He knelt beside the fallen man and examined him. It was a messy sight. The businessman must have been thrown against the side of the cabin by the shock of the blowup. His head was twisted in a funny way and there was a deep cut behind one ear. Blood was trickling from his lips.
Rand said, “We’ll have to leave him behind.” “We can’t do that!”
Leswick gasped. “That would be murder!”
“Look,” Rand said, “this fellow’s got a broken neck and maybe a fractured skull too. And we aren’t doctors. By the time we could carry him to the lifeship he’d be dead.”
“But to abandon him in cold blood — “ Leswick protested.
“Do you think he could survive a voyage in a lifeship?” Rand asked. “Forget about him. There’s no way we can help him, Leswick. Absolutely no way.”
Dombey chimed in, “Yeah. This guy, he’s mostly dead right now. We better save room in the lifeship for somebody in better shape.”
“And we’d better get going fast,” Rand said.
He turned and headed back down the passageway. Dombey followed him. After a moment, so did Leswick, leaving the dying man where he lay.
Rand looked into another cabin and saw another passenger who was still alive. But he was even more seriously injured than the first one. His eyes were closed and he was making soft groaning sounds. Rand shook his head sadly.
“We’ll have to leave him too,” he said.
He went to the cabin phone and punched for INFO. “Give me a complete rundown on passengers and crew,” he ordered. “I want to know how many are still alive, how many dead, how many missing. Check every scanner.”
The computer had scanning eyes all over the ship. It constantly drew information from all of them. In a fraction of a second it added up the totals.
“Five men are known to be alive,” it reported. “Eighteen men are known to be dead. The remaining fifteen men are missing and believed to be dead.”
Rand nodded. “Okay, that settles it. Five men alive — that’s the three of us, plus the two injured passengers we just found. There’s no sense wasting time looking for anybody else. Leswick, Dombey — let’s clear out!”
He rushed down the passageway toward the nearest lifeship.
CHAPTER 4
THE LIFESHIP wasn’t very much more than a bubble of metal and plastic with a spacedrive attached. It could hold three men comfortably, or four men uncomfortably, and that was all.
Rand made sure the lifeship was in working order by asking the computer to run a quick checkout.
“All systems go,” the computer replied.
“Right.” Rand pointed a finger at Leswick. “Get inside and strap yourself in.”
Leswick started to enter. Suddenly Rand noticed that the little philosopher was carrying a huge book. He must have picked it up from his cabin on the way to the lifeship.
“Hold it, Leswick. What’s that book?”
“Something to pass the time while I’m waiting to be rescued,” he said. “Why? What’s wrong?”
Rand took the book from him and looked it over. His mouth turned down in scorn. The title was, An Application of Matrix Field Theory to the Cultural Units of Eastern New Guinea. That didn’t tell him a whole lot. He flipped through it and saw that it was the usual Metaphysical Synthesist sort of stuff. A batch of fancy mathematics and long words, adding up to nothing that anybody in his right mind could find useful.
“We’ll leave the book behind,” Rand said.
“No!” Leswick protested. “What right have you —”
“The lifeship’s small and crowded. This book is heavy. It’s just dead weight. We can’t afford to drag it along.”
Leswick grabbed at it. “You can’t just toss it away like that! I need that book! It’s important to my work!”
“Aw, let him have it, boss,” Dombey boomed. “It don’t take up that much space.”
Rand realized that he was being too hard on Leswick. Maybe the book was silly nonsense, Maybe Metaphysical Synthesis itself was silly nonsense. But this was no time to set himself up as the judge of that. He was letting his prejudices get a little too much control over him.
“Okay,” Rand said. “Here.”
He flipped the book back to Leswick, who caught it clumsily in the pit of his stomach. Leswick tucked the big book under his arm. He swung open the airlock hatch and stepped into the lifeship.
From somewhere deep in the mother ship came the rumblings of a far-off explosion. The computer’s voice said, “The fire has reached the fuel storage chambers. Best procedure for survivors is to abandon ship at once.”
“You bet,” Rand said. “We don’t need a computer to help us figure that one out!”
Dombey climbed in after Leswick, and Rand followed him. He yanked down the handle that sealed the lifeship’s airlock. Then Rand strapped himself down on the chair in front of the control panel. The other two men climbed into acceleration couches just behind him.
The voice of the computer said, “To achieve exit from the mother ship, press the red knob on the keyboard before you.”
Rand looked at the knob. He didn’t need the computer’s help for that one, either. The knob was plainly marked as the blastoff control. The hard part of the job would come later — when they were on their own, traveling through space.
He wouldn’t have any computer to give him advice then. The computer would still be aboard the Clyde F. Bohmer. Maybe it could direct him by radio for a little while, but not for long. The Clyde F. Bohmer was going to blow up any minute.
Rand suddenly began to sweat. Fear sent cold trickles of perspiration down his sides. Sweat pasted his close-cut hair together into little spikes. For the first time since the trouble began, he was really worried.
Three lives — including his own — lay in his hands.
And he had never piloted any sort of spaceship before.
“We’d better take off, shouldn’t we?” Leswick said nervously. “I mean, the ship is in danger of exploding. Why are we staying here? Is there any problem?”
“Yeah, boss, you having trouble?” Dombey asked.
“None at all,” Rand forced himself to say. “Everything’s okay. I’ve got matters well under control.”
And to his surprise he realized he was speaking the truth. Channels of his mind that he had thought were long closed by rust suddenly opened brightly.
He had never piloted a spaceship, that was true enough. But he had basic knowledge, a grasp of theory. He knew how a spaceship worked, and why. And he knew more than enough math to compute a sort of orbit to the nearest planet.
Maybe it wouldn’t be the kind of slick job a real space pilot would do. But the orbit he worked out would get them where they wanted to go. So things were well under control …
He hoped.
With fingers that were calm and steady, Rand reached up and pressed the knob that would shoot the lifeship out of the dying Clyde F. Bohmer.
The knob passed a signal along to the catapults mounted in the walls around the lifeship. The catapults pushed the lifeship forward. At the same time a big hatch slid open in the outer skin of the mother ship.
The lifeship shot forth into space.
Automatically the computer turned the lifeship’s engines on. A surge of power sent the little vessel streaking out into the darkness of space.
“We’re on our way,” Rand said.
He didn’t feel much of a thrill. He had hoped to be piloting Professor David Loder to safety, along with the cargo of precious drugs. But Loder was dead and the drugs were ruined. Out of all that had been aboard the spaceship, he was saving only himself and two others. None of us really matters at all, Rand thought. I’m just an engineer — we’re a dime a dozen. And Leswick is a worthless little cockeyed philosopher. And Dombey’s a moron of a jetmonkey who probably can’t even read or write. What a cargo! Just a load of dead we
ight!
“You know where we’re going, huh?” Dombey asked.
“Sure thing,” said Rand.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was running down into his eyes and bothering him.
The lifeship was still in radio contact with the mother ship’s computer. Rand said, “How many planets are within range of this lifeship?”
The computer answered, “Three. They belong to the solar system of a star numbered GGC 8788845 in the latest catalog. A rescue beacon was constructed on the second planet of the system in the year 2432.”
“Fine,” said Rand. “I want you to calculate an orbit for me that’ll bring this lifeship down right next to the beacon.”
The computer was silent. Rand imagined the electronic impulses racing around inside its complicated machinery. Two or three minutes went by.
“How’s that orbit coming?” he asked. “It shouldn’t have taken you this long.”
The computer made no reply.
“Answer me,” Rand said. “This is Captain Rand speaking. I’m giving you a direct order: feed me that orbit at once.”
Silence.
“Do you hear me?”
More silence.
“I think the big brain’s in trouble,” Dombey said. “It oughta be talking to you, boss. Why ain’t it answering?”
CHAPTER 5
RAND DIDN’T say anything. Suddenly he felt the air in the lifeship cabin growing warm. He could hear the air conditioners working hard to keep the temperature down. He began to realize what must have happened.
He switched on the rear viewscreen.
The screen lit up and flickered wavily for a moment. Then the image focused. Against the blackness of space there was a sprinkling of tiny bright stars. And in the foreground blazed a brand new star that wasn’t listed in any of the star catalogs.
It wasn’t a star. It was what had been the Clyde F. Bohmer.
“Take a look at the ship,” Rand said. He pointed toward the rear screen.
“Where?” Leswick said. “I don’t see any ship.”
“It’s that bright star right in front. That’s what happens when a spaceship’s fuel storage chambers explode. There’s nothing left of that ship but atoms.”
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