The Collected Stories

by Earl

  When his eyes had cleared sufficiently from mistiness, Sorrel glanced around the cabin. All was not in order. The space chart was lighted up and the gauge needles quivered normally, but the electric chronometer was dead, half the lights were out, and the air smelled foul. And there was an unnatural stillness—the engines were silent!

  “Suffering blue comets! What in the——”

  The first officer bit off his words and left his position by the wall. He swayed across the room in a long practiced spaceman’s swagger, and found himself still unsteady. Then he kneeled beside Robey, the ship’s captain. The latter, a gob of dried blood under his nose, was groaning and twitching convulsively.

  “Steady there——”

  Sorrel put an arm under Robey’s shoulders and raised his head. The captain opened his eyes. Then he closed them again, moaning. There was a bump on his forehead as big as an egg, as though he had catapulted across the cabin against one hard beryllium wall.

  “Captain, wake up! Can you hear me?”

  There was an answering groan. Robey sent an exploring hand to his head. There followed a stream of muttered curses.

  The first officer grinned and yanked him to his feet. Robey stiffened gamely, sagged once, and then straightened up. He shook his head and opened bloodshot eyes, blinking owlishly.

  “What’s up, Sorrel?”

  “Don’t know, sir. Can you manage?”

  “Yeah. Blast this headache, though. What did happen?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Talking to you. Then—well, I went out like a light!”

  “Me too.”

  The two head officers of the freighter Edison looked at each other queerly. Then, as one, they swung around and strode to the secondary pilot board. Their eyes riveted to the space chart.

  “Do you see what I see, Mr. Sorrel?”

  “I see our course dot parading in forbidden territory, sir. Maybe it’s misplaced from the true position.”

  “And again maybe not.”

  CAPTAIN ROBEY took a confirming glance. Then he whirled and dashed for the companionway. Sorrel was right at his heels as he climbed the narrow ladder to the pilot’s cupola near the nose of the ship. Swinging open the door, they dashed to the pilot board. The space chart seemed to loom in their eyes as it showed the same crazy reading the secondary had.

  Captain Robey faced his first officer. “What do you think, Mr. Sorrel?” He emphasized the pronoun as though he had his own conviction already.

  “Looks bad, sir. Either we’re dreaming or the chart’s screwy. On the other hand, the blood under your nose is dried and caked. Which means you, and therefore I, have been out for some hours. Liska’s out too.” He pointed to the pilot’s body, crumpled in one comer.

  “Wish the chronometers were working,” faltered the captain, unwillingly forced to the other’s conclusion. “Queer that one of our electrical circuits should blow a fuse—so seldom happens. But you’re right, of course; the engines are dead, so the crew is out too.”

  Avoiding the captain’s eyes, the first officer picked the pilot’s space-lightened body from the floor. Liska, a big but gentle-faced man, came out of his stupor with a faint groan.

  “Liska!” The captain’s voice was tense. “What happened? Can you remember anything?”

  The pilot licked a split lip. “Last thing, sir, I see a tenner on the chart. I warped course, captain, swung starboard ten points—should have passed it safely.”

  “Must have passed it safely,” said the captain irritably. “Of course, or we wouldn’t be here. But sure it wasn’t more than a tenner?”

  “Tenners and up are rare, captain,” reminded Liska, lowering himself heavily into the swivel chair before the pilot board. He glanced apologetically at his dangling, left arm.

  The captain, unnoticing, spoke: “Just where are we?”

  Sorrel was already there, looking closely. A numbing sensation crept over his heart as he integrated their position, reading the degrees on the cross hairs of the chart, and transposing to miles from the scale below.

  “What does it integrate?” asked the captain, trying to keep his throat from crawling at the sight of the first officer’s grave face.

  “Fourth quadrant, three degrees off ecliptic, sir. Six point zero two warp from the Saturn-sun line. Miles out from Saturn’s orbit——”

  “Yes——”

  “Almost fifty million——”

  “Liska, check!” The captain’s voice was incredulous.

  The pilot had only to glance at the chart. To his trained perceptions, the readings integrated almost simultaneously. “That’s it, sir, as Mr. Sorrel read it. We’ve been unconscious, I should guess, about seventeen hours.”

  The captain leaned against the wall, shuddering. “Three degrees off ecliptic; six points plus warp—fifty million miles too far! We should be docking at Zarnoville, Saturn, at about this time. Instead, we’re way out here, off course. That tenner must have——”

  “Your pardon, sir,” broke in Sorrel. “Look at the fuel gauges!”

  Startled, the captain and pilot twisted their heads to see. The needle readings stared back—main tank, near empty.

  That was as it should be. But: “Emergency tank—empty!” gasped the captain. He paled under his ruddy complexion. Liska turned a pasty-white.

  Sorrel was the first to speak after a deathly silence. “Which means we’re not only off course, sir. but in danger!”

  THERE WAS a noisy interruption. A figure plunged into the room, stumbling. McQuale, head engineer, clutched at a safety rail, caught it, and pulled himself erect. Sandy hair matted with dried blood, he looked at the three men, panting.

  “I’d like to know,” he spluttered, “who clubbed my men, and me with—with a three-foot jet tube, I would. Devil take me, but we’re a nasty bunch down aft—cracked skulls, sprained arms and legs, and a dozen bruises apiece. Like a cyclone blew us around, plague on it! And it looks”—his eyes went to Liska’s limp and swollen arm—“as though things weren’t so gentle up here!”

  “We got it too,” said Sorrel. “But the men. Sandy——”

  “I got them all up and around,” assured the engineer. “That is, all except Gordy. He’s sorta—still knocked out.”

  “Killed?” It was the captain’s voice, hoarse.

  “No. Can’t kill him so easy. Just out—probably concussion. He hit the Number Two fuel breech with his head, I think. I’ll bring him around.”

  No longer panting, McQuale’s voice had become laconic. “But now what’s to be done, sir? Begging your pardon for asking.”

  His quick, intelligent eyes had taken in the situation at a glance. He had seen the course chart; knew enough to realize they were far off course. He knew, too, better than any one, how empty the fuel tanks were. And he even noticed—by the way his mild, gray eyes peered at First Officer Sorrel—that there was a tenseness in the air.

  The captain looked from one to the other. “We’re in a bad hole, men, no use denying it. We’re way out of radio range for help—at least twenty million miles.

  “Mr. Sorrel, inspect the ship. See about the emergency tank, the burned-out circuit, and the air conditioner.

  “McQuale, get your men shipshape and—better get your engines primed and fueled, ready for top action. I’ll take over the pilot board at present. Liska, begin working a countercourse.”

  The pilot’s face was twisting, revealing clenched teeth. “My arm’s broken, sir. The pain——”

  “To hell with your arm!” exploded the captain. “This is a case of life and death. You’re a spaceman; show your grit. You got us into this, letting a tenner graze us. It’s up to you to bring us out with every trick you’ve ever learned in space navigation.”

  Robey’s nostrils flared wide; his lips curled in something of scorn as the pilot, big as he was, shrunk visibly into the pilot seat. “And if you weaken and faint—by Heavens. I’ll have you slung out the G lock!”

  “I won�
��t sir! I’ll——” Liska began working feverishly with pencil, navigation tables and desk charts. His left arm, swollen and useless, hung limp; it brought the sweat of agony to his forehead.

  The captain swung on the other two. “I don’t know how bad this is yet, not till I see the countercourse. But I can tell you it’s going to be tight. Every man aboard this ship will have to be on his toes from now on.” He paused, eyes hard. “All right, get going.”

  Sorrel and McQuale jumped to obey.

  “And Mr. Sorrel,” added the captain, “see about Professor Chesloe.”

  II.

  OFFICER SORREL had plenty to do, inspecting ship. His heavy, iron shoes clumped noisily against the metal flooring in the hollowness of the narrow side passageways.

  The fuse boxes of the Edison’s duo-electrical system were in the bow. He found one set of fuses scorched and blackened. Somehow, that didn’t strike him right.

  Replacing them, he retraced his steps to the core of the ship and examined the air conditioner, finding its automatic feed valves jammed as though some giant power had slammed it with a brick. It had left only a tiny trickle of oxygen flowing out into the distributing system. They had been breathing the same air ever since the accident that had knocked them all out. Ten minutes with a wrench repaired the flow.

  Sorrel went on, puzzled. He found the four huge gyros—which ran from individual battery supplies because of their importance—in smooth operation, whining plaintively. But when he came to the room which held the sizable emergency tank, he stopped short at the sight.

  Some inexplicable force, working through hull and bulkhead, had ripped a seam. Because of the giant ship’s own gravity field—concentrated appreciably to the forward bow—the almost weightless, but dense, liquid had seeped out and was now rolling in tiny globules over all the walls and floor.

  Sorrel shook his head. Diligent effort might scrape together a few quarts of impure fuel, but most of it had by now gravitated into every nook and corner of the subcenter catwalks.

  It took Sorrel an hour to peer in every part of the huge freighter, making sure nothing else had suffered damage. They were lucky at that. The glancing crash, spinning the men off their feet against the hard, metal walls, had done little other harm.

  Yet he held his breath, traversing the catwalks just inside the hull, fearing to hear a faint hiss. If the beryllium hull had sprung a tiny leak in whatever cataclysmic strain the ship had been through, then things would be bad. But all was shipshape.

  He reported as much to the captain, who was straining his eyes on the dials of the pilot board. “Relief to hear that,” said Robey. “Did you find Professor Chesloe?”

  “No, couldn’t see him around,” said Sorrel. “But then I didn’t go in either of the bunk rooms. Shall I see about him now, sir?”

  Sorrel waited respectfully for an answer, but the captain, apparently forgetting the matter, asked instead: “What’s your theory, Mr. Sorrel? That tenner grazed us? Bounced us lightly, but enough to knock us off course?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Sorrel noncommittally.

  “Well, what else could it have been?” bristled the captain.

  Sorrel shook his head vaguely. “It’s my opinion, sir, that there are things in space—mysterious forces, I might say—that no one knows anything about. We might have run into something——”

  “Into something not recorded in space annals, is that it?”

  “My idea runs in that line,” admitted the first officer. “How can mysterious and destructive forces get in space annals if the ships meeting them—never come back!”

  Robey grinned mirthlessly. “Cheerful cuss, you are.”

  “I’ll tell you, sir, what makes me question grazing a tenner. In the first place, any contact with a meteor that big at our speed—and its possibly as great counterspeed—would not simply bump us off course. More likely, sir, it would bash in at least one hull plate and squash a bulkhead or two.

  “The hull, though, is undamaged, smooth as a baby’s skin. The strain indicators on the forward bulkheads register a couple of points—insignificant, of course. Then, sir, the one circuit was burned out by an outside agency; there was no interior short-circuit. Also. Liska is a triple-A pilot; he just doesn’t let tenners get close.”

  Robey’s face clouded. “Sticking up for him, eh? Think maybe I’m too hard; Sorrel, you talk too much. You’re to obey orders, not air your pet theories.”

  THE FIRST OFFICER reached a hand for the safety rail, gripping it hard, squeezing the firm bar as though trying to crush it. He tore his eyes away from the captain’s adamant ones and shot a glance to the desk at which Liska worked furiously with pencil and slide rule. For a moment a great anger shook the young officer, made his lips writhe. Then he relaxed. “Yes, captain. Your orders, sir?”

  “I think you’d better go aft and see how McQuale is getting along. We must have those engines all primed and ready for——”

  A new voice broke in, high-pitched. “What about me? You don’t consider me at all!”

  Robey turned his head to the doorway. “Professor Chesloe!”

  “Yes, it’s me. Surprised to see me. I’ll wager. Forgot all about me, I dare say. You would have let me lie there dying, for all you cared. Can you vindicate yourself? No, of course not.

  “First you fling your ship around—in spite, I’d say, knowing I’m new at this space traveling—and then you let me lie crushed and bleeding without a thought for me. Oh, my head is splitting! Besides, I thought we should be landed by now. See, my watch says seven o’clock. We were to dock at five.”

  “I’m sorry about the whole thing, professor,” said the captain testily. “But I haven’t got the time now to explain. Mr. Sorrel, show Professor Chesloe to the bunk room.”

  “But, Captain Robey, what has happened?”

  “Explanations later,” the captain said tersely.

  “Are you being insolent?” demanded the little man irately. He barely came to Sorrel’s shoulder. His pinched face worked alarmingly. “I’m a passenger, entitled to due respect. You can order your men around as you will, but I’ve paid for courtesy and respect!”

  “You’ll get it,” returned the captain with a bark. He darted impatient eyes toward Li ska’s back. The pilot sat industriously working out his intricate space warps, teeth gripped tight to keep from yielding to pain. Watching him. Sorrel felt a great admiration. Spacemen were certainly a game lot. But at the same time, he felt a subtle dread. Liska was carrying everything to the last decimal, was rechecking carefully—which did not look like good news.

  Suddenly Liska swayed to his feet; Sorrel sprang to his side. The lone passenger of the Edison, about to retort scathingly to the captain’s indifferent attitude toward him, instead stared, puzzled. The pilot held up the sheet of final computations. “Here they are, sir.”

  “All right, go ahead.” Robey’s voice was a mixture of testiness and instinctive dread.

  Liska swallowed. “Way I see it, we can only rear-jet into our course.”

  Robey forced a wry grin. “How about a long arc swing in toward Jupiter?”

  “Out of the question, sir. Fuel reserve too small.”

  “Well, got it all worked out?”

  “Yes, sir. To save time, we can rear-jet at extra timing. That’ll stop our velocity with respect to Saturn in fourteen hours. Then we give a final push-back.”

  “Final push? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, sir, that fuel is very low and——”

  “But surely we’ve got enough to get up some speed back to Saturn! Don’t stand there and tell me——”

  LISKA’S FACE grew suddenly purple and he clutched at his wounded arm. “We’ll be damn lucky, sir, if we get that final back push!” With a little moan, he fainted. Sorrel eased him into his chair.

  “Mr. Sorrel, get the first-aid kit,” said Robey. “We’ve got to doctor Liska. He’s indispensable now that we’ve got to back-track. You and I can handle straight course, but
no swing ship.”

  Sorrel returned quickly. Without a word Robey opened the first-aid kit. With Sorrel’s help, lie set the broken bone.

  “In bad shape,” muttered the captain when it was done. “Best thing for him would be a hospital. I’ll give him a shot and bring him to. After he’s set course, you and I will take alternate relief at the pilot board. And, Mr. Sorrel, you’d better go down aft now and pep up the men. Don’t tell them everything. Let them think we’ve got plenty of fuel, or there’ll be hell to pay. Tell McQuale to stand by for action in the engine room.”

  “Right, sir.” Sorrel left.

  Captain Robey turned back to his chart. Carefully he looked over the luminescent quadrant sections in front of their course dot to make sure no fiver or larger meteor was in their path. Warning always came at least five minutes before time, leaving plenty of time to warp course and avoid danger.

  The space chart was a miraculous instrument—perhaps the one most important item to space travel next to the fuel. The principle of supersonic radio waves, reflecting from bodies ahead, spotting the danger on a luminous chart, was beyond Robey’s mental attainment. But he admired things he could not understand.

  “Forgotten me again!”

  Robey started. He had indeed. “Now, Professor Chesloe——”

  “Just a minute.” There was a new note in the little man’s voice—a sort of hollowness. “I’ve heard certain things, captain, and guessed the rest. It seems we’re in a dangerous predicament. Right?’

  “Yes, you can’t be fooled now. I had planned to keep the facts from you.” The professor boiled up. “Afraid I’d weaken—turn coward?”

  “Before this trip is over,” said the captain ominously, “we’re going to find out if there are any yellow streaks among us!”

  The volatile professor sobered. “Anything I can do?”

  “Not a thing—yet.”