by Earl
“Yes, there is,” returned the other brusquely. “I hereby appoint myself caretaker of Liska. I can hand him his food, water to drink. I can help out in little ways, can’t I?”
Robey looked at the little professor queerly, but said nothing.
III.
SORREL crawled agilely down the companionway ladder. He cursed at the pain in his bruised body from the knock that had spun the ship off its course. He heaped revilements, too, on the ache that persisted in his head.
In the engine room he found Sandy McQuale and his seven hearties in a group, vehemently discussing the state of affairs. All of them showed the marks of the catastrophe that had tossed them about in the ship like sacks of meal. One man lay still in the side bunks, pale of face. A sudden silence fell over the room as Sorrel entered.
“Stand by for action, men. We’ll swing ship and back-track any minute. Engines all primed?”
McQuale waved an arm to include the quadruple jet systems set in the stem wall, which was the rear of the ship. Mighty feeder valves open, solid spark chambers intact, long slim jet tubes vanishing into the back wall, the powerful machines looked ready to drum into their throbbing song of power—rocket power—the power of a liquid to which nitroglycerin was so much finger snapping. Slung in their sprung holders above were the fuel chambers, which had to be refilled periodically from the main tank to the fore part of the ship.
“All primed and raring to go,” assured McQuale. “And the sooner we gets going, the better. How about it, men?”
A murmur of approbation rose from the grimy tenders.
“I told the men you officers don’t rightly know just what happened back there when we were jetting peacefully enough from Jove Station to Zarnovillo. Some of them were even a wee bit panicky about it, wondering where we were at. I says, wherever we’re at, we’re not going to stay long, and we’d be getting along just as soon as the captain and Mr. Liska plotted back-track. Nothing to be alarmed about, is there, Mr. Sorrel?”
There was just the faintest flutter of McQuale’s eyes, facing the first officer. Sorrel took the cue. “Why no, of course not.” He forced a laugh that sounded genuine enough. “It is a fact that we’re a bit in doubt as to how we got sidetracked, but we’ll be back toward Saturn any minute now. The whole thing amounts to just a delay.”
Sorrel then pulled the head engineer aside after McQuale had sent his men to stand by at the engines for immediate action. “Any trouble, Sandy?”
“No! Except they are a bit nervous.
A plague on them! But I can handle them, don’t worry.”
“How about him?” Sorrel jerked his head toward the man in the bunk.
“Got a good knock on his dome,” drawled the engineer. “Robey better look him over first chance he gets. Say. Mr. Sorrel”—he lowered his voice—“I ain’t exactly dumb. It’s going to be tight—getting back?”
“Too tight for comfort, Sandy.”
McQuale nodded soberly. “I don’t want to be impertinent, Mr. Sorrel, but the captain had better begin thinking about the cargo question—understand what I mean?”
The first officer carefully picked a thread off his coat sleeve. “Captain Robey always thinks of those things in advance, Sandy.”
The engineer squinted. “He thinks with his head, but not with his heart.” He was about to say something further when the attention bell rang loudly. Sorrel left and made his way forward. As he entered the main cabin, Captain Robey, who stood tensed before the secondary pilot board, motioned toward the master controls.
“That tenner pulled us fourteen degrees out of line.” His voice was hard with a trace of impotent anger. “Fourteen degrees—gyros, momentum, and all. And this is rated as a pretty big ship in space commerce! Damned if I don’t think that tenner was made of solid lead!”
Sorrel hid a steely grin as he stepped before the master controls. It was good now and then to see a cocksure captain up against one of the many inexplicable mysteries of space.
EYES on the dozens of dials and gauges, Robey barked into the intraphone system of the ship: “Pilot room, ready?”
Liska’s voice came back, pain-twisted: “Ready, sir!”
“Engine room, ready?”
“Right, sir!” came Sandy McQuale’s phlegmatic tones.
Robey then glanced with arched brows to First Officer Sorrel at the master controls. Sorrel nodded, grimlipped.
“Stand by for top action!”
There was a moment of absolute silence all over the ship. In itself it was nothing extraordinary. The swing ship maneuver was used by every ship not equipped with fore rockets for landing.
In this instance it meant far more than merely switching tail and nose fourteen degrees. It was the frantic attempt of a ship off course—and, worst of all, barren of fuel—to get out of alien territory and back into its normal sphere of the void. Saturn’s sparse settlements were mankind’s farthest reaches outward from the Sun. The freighter Edison was much farther.
Captain Robey parted his lips in his customary commanding voice, half bark, half snarl: “Cut gyro!”
Sorrel crooked his elbow, jerking over a large lever, notch by notch. The inanimate silence of the ship was disturbed by a high-pitched whine that rapidly sank in tone and finally moaned to nothingness.
“Double-floor gravity!”
Again Sorrel acted at the main controls, shifting a rheostat handle that pushed twice the normal electric power through the powerful floor magnets. It would take a major shock now to dislodge their steel-shod shoes from the grip of the magnetized floor plates.
“Engine room attention! Attention,. Liska! Feed tenth-norm jets at starboard; ten degree oblique per minute!”
Then the silence was shattered by a muted thunder from aft, as Liska, up forward, adjusted his levers. Down below, McQuale darted his hawklike glance over the panel of indicators which showed in detail the exact output of each engine—each individual jet, in fact.
The huge ship, like a sluggish whale immersed in heavy oil, ponderously swung its nose sideways to the terrific forward velocity. It seemed to resent being forced out of its natural groove, but the snarling, flaming port-side rocket jets left no choice. The huge space craft, although weightless, had a gigantic momentum—a product of its great mass. This momentum the throbbing engines had to combat in swinging nose and tail even a little.
Captain Robey saw a dial needle quiver at the number eleven, then crawl crazily past twelve and thirteen. “Attention, Liska! Cut to eighth norm, at starboard, reduce oblique to six!”
The humming thunder from the rear rose rather than died lower; a new bank of balancing jets at starboard had joined in the battle, imparting a slight upswing—up being toward Saturn.
For perhaps ten seconds the process went evenly, and one and all they could feel a slight port-side list as the mighty beryllium craft picked up a twisting momentum. Its nose subtended the black arc of space, cutting the constellations sharply.
IV.
CAPTAIN ROBEY watched his indicators closely, hands firmly gripping the wall safety rail. A wrong blast now, the slightest of misapplied forces out in frictionless space, would throw the ship’s radial axis out of line. That would necessitate the use of more fuel to right the ship. And fuel was precious, more precious to them at the time than even their entire cargo.
“Attention, Liska! Increase to nine point five norm at starboard, reduce oblique to four. Stand by for tangent in ten seconds!”
The pounding engines abruptly eased their mad rhythm. But there was no jar. In space with no gravity, motion accelerates or decelerates smoothly. The mechanics of inertia and momentum and weight-free mass are a system of motion as uniform as a flowing river.
“Ready for tangent; watch it—plus four-three, fourth quadrant!”
With a sullen roar the aft blasts crescendoed angrily; the Edison’s nose tilted upward to the ecliptic plane of the solar system, slowly and evenly—the motion dying at the precise moment that the longer axis of the bullet-s
haped ship had paralleled the plane.
“Stand by, all hands, for final orders!”
Captain Robey’s eyes fairly flew over his instrument panel, fixing each number for but an instant. “Attention! Full blast at port side, double norm. Cut starboard two seconds later!”
Only a triple-A pilot could have done that last delicate trick, stopping the great ship’s up-and-around swing at precisely the point necessary. The final powerful jet stream that arrested the turn produced a thrilling surge of deceleration.
“Sorrel, gyro!”
The first officer slid his lever over carefully. The ship seemed to shiver an instant, then locked into space. Four mighty gyroscopes now held the Edison in its new groove.
Robey squeezed his sweating fingers, sighing in relief. He spoke then, hoarsely: “Pretty good, says I. As smooth as the straight about ship between planets.”
“Liska showed his triple-A rating,” commented Sorrel.
Robey frowned. Then he turned to the phone: “Attention, Liska! Backtrack as per course sheet. Give her extra timing.”
Strangely, there was no response from the engines.
“Liska!”
A voice came from the phone, quavering: “Liska’s fainted, captain! Better come up and see about him. He was too weak even to pull the last lever; I had to do that!”
Captain Robey banged his palms together. “Liska out again! I thought he was a man!” He looked at Sorrel, black brows contracted. The first officer avoided his eyes, but he said quietly: “Liska got the worst of any of us in the shake-up.”
Robey pushed Ins face forward, aggressively. “Still sticking for the under dog! I know human nature, Sorrel. A captain gets to know its wide varieties, and the symptoms of a yellow streak. Do you know why Liska is falling apart—inside? Because he realizes, better than you and I even, by what a slim margin we may pull back to Saturn—if we do!”
“We may have to toss out cargo,” returned Sorrel bluntly.
The captain’s face grew livid. “You dare——” He choked. “Listen, Sorrel, captains who throw out cargo are branded for life. They sink to gutters. They end up in spacemen’s dives, objects of scorn. The space code is hard, pitiless—but glorious! I will live up to the last dot of the code, not because I fear disgrace, but because I believe in it.”
Sorrel gave his superior eye for eye. “Those captains who have tossed out cargo to bring in a disabled or underfueled ship, did not do so willingly. Crews have a code of their own!”
“And the first rule is: ‘Save my own precious skin,’ ” spat out Robey with infinite disgust in his tone. “Bah! A dead man is worth two living cowards.” Then the captain’s face grew flinty: “And remember this, Sorrel. The Edison docks at Zarnovillo with full cargo or it doesn’t dock at all! Now dash up to the pilot room and give her extra timing. And see about Liska. I’ll take a three-hour trick at the space chart down here.”
Sorrel left expressionlessly. But within himself he wondered what the outcome of the strange drama would be. A crew of men to whom the breath of life was important; a captain whose stern code held life cheaply. There would come a crisis.
IN THE PILOT CUPOLA Sorrel found Professor Chesloe nervously rubbing Liska’s forehead with a moistened handkerchief. He looked up mournfully: “This man isn’t only bruised, Mr. Sorrel. He’s running a fever. Might have internal injuries.”
Sorrel stepped to the pilot board, called McQuale for warning, and brought the engines to roaring life at double the usual rate. Then he turned to the unconscious pilot. “You think, professor, he’s in a bad way?”
“Look at his face,” spluttered the little man. “No man in half-decent condition would look that bad. I would say he should be put to bed and attended to. He’s obviously unable to carry on. Why, his face was a mask of agony while he carried out Captain Robey’s orders.” Sorrel turned to the desk phone, to notice, with a little shock, that it was open, connected to the captain’s cabin below. “Captain Robey——”
“Yes, I heard Chesloe’-s report,” came Robey’s voice metallically. But behind the tinny tones there was a cold rage. “In a bad way, eh? Well, I’m no regular doctor. I’ve done what I could for him, fixed his broken arm. And since there is no one else here can do any more——”
Professor Chesloe sprang to the phone, thrusting out his lips as though about to bite into the mouthpiece. “You don’t have to be so brutal about it, Captain Robey! I heard before I took passage on the Edison that you were one of the hardest captains in the service. Believe me, sir, you are all of that and more. In the name of humanity, I demand that Liska be relieved of all duty and be taken care of, somehow.”
A dry, harsh chuckle came from the phone. “Hard, am I? Maybe you don’t know how hard I can be! Well, if you’re so concerned about the man, professor, I leave him in your hands, if you care to——”
“I do and shall!” barked the little man.’ Sorrel snapped the instrument off before the fiery professor could say more. Chesloe glared at him.
“Is your captain a man or fiend?” he asked heatedly.
The first officer shrugged. “You’re not used to the frank reality of life in space. Out here we cannot play act. The stern job of coaxing ships across the void leaves no place for sham or pretense.”
Chesloe quieted down, shaking his head. “But he hates Liska. Why is that?”
“Always did, I think,” replied Sorrel. “Then this incident which threw us off course——Robey believes Liska to be responsible.”
“And what do you believe?” asked Chesloe curiously.
Sorrel shrugged. “Liska is a master pilot.”
The volatile professor had become suddenly thoughtful. “I say, Sorrel, how do you account for the fact that every soul aboard this ship was unconscious for exactly seventeen hours? That’s a long time to be unconscious and for every man to be——”
Sorrel looked up startled. “Suffering comets! And that fits in with my idea!”
“Which is?”
The first officer looked at the little professor a moment speculatively. “That a mysterious force, probably emanating from that meteor we passed, played some queer pranks with us. It blew out a circuit, ripped the emergency tank to hell, threw us off course to an incredible extent, jammed the air conditioner, and put us all out for exactly seventeen hours!”
Chesloe looked puzzled. “I never heard of such a force. I don’t claim to know much about space travel, but I do know a good deal of space theory, and I never heard of it.”
“No one’s heard of it,” said Sorrel. “But then, man doesn’t know everything yet about space. I may be all wrong, but this is sure—it was no ordinary thing put us in this predicament.”
They turned suddenly at a groan from the pilot, limp in his seat. His head bobbed back, and he twitched his bandaged arm. “Down to the bunk room with him,” said Sorrel, picking him up bodily.
V.
FOUR HOURS LATER, the Edison still streaking backward with decreasing velocity, the even roar of the engines became spasmodic. Sorrel, at the space chart in the pilot’s cupola, cut the power with a hasty snap. He switched on the phone. Before he had a chance to speak, Captain Robey’s angry voice bellowed out: “What’s up now? McQuale! What happened down there?”
The chief engineer’s voice came through the wires, sadly: “What I feared, sir, plague take it! B-engine blew a breech head!”
“But why, man—have you been careless?”
“Not me, sir. Must have something to do with the crack-up we had.”
“Well, fix it up. Mr. Sorrel, put in engines A and C.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” came McQuale’s voice quickly. “There ain’t no fixing to be done! The blow-out cracked three jets. B-engine is a goner till we dock and get her overhauled.” Captain Robey groaned. “More time wasted! All right, Mr. Sorrel; we’ll have to limp along with two engines.”
In response to the first officer’s manipulation, the throb of the rockets again burst out. But now the ship
ran at only half power. With B-engine out of action, engine D was automatically useless. Sorrel stared at the space chart cheerlessly. Now, more than ever, was their case precarious. They had really needed the quadruple engine power to cut their terrific velocity away from Saturn.
Two engines could do it, with the same fuel supply, in twice the time—theoretically. Actually, because of an involved momentum-relative-velocity equation, there was a mileage loss, not great, but looming vastly important in their unhopeful situation.
When Captain Robey, red-eyed from a short cat nap, took over the space chart two hours later, Sorrel went midships to the bunk room. He found Professor Chesloe staring wide-eyed at Liska’s still figure in a bunk. Sorrel read his horror-stricken eyes, took a confirming glance, and then quietly motioned for the little man to follow to the captain’s cabin.
Robey took the news in an angry calm. “Liska dead, eh? I had an idea he couldn’t stand the gaff.”
“Well, after all,” bristled Chesloe, outraged, “it wasn’t Liska’s fault! The man didn’t want to die! Internal injuries would kill any man.”
“He died from fright, I say,” stated the captain. “Mental suicide. Because he knew we had no chance to get back!” Robey twisted his lips in a ghastly, mirthless laugh. “No chance at all! I checked his figures an hour ago. He had the decimals padded in our favor, but it read the same.
“We will reach zero velocity, relative to Saturn, in ten hours. And then we’ll have just enough fuel to give one hearty shove back where we belong. We’ll crawl back to Saturn, slowly but surely. But it will take three months!”
Sorrel’s spine crinkled. Chesloe gaped and stammered.
“Of course,” said Robey maliciously, as though enjoying it, “we aren’t rationed to last one month, much less three months. The Edison will be our coffin!”
“My Lord!”
THE PROFESSOR had found his tongue. He glanced from one to the other, saw the captain stony-faced, Sorrel white-faced but steady. “Good Heavens, Sorrel! Tell me the captain’s crazy! It can’t be! Sorrel, that isn’t true, is it!”
