Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  Mrs. Logan then pointed to the series of little ports in the hull.

  Farradyne explained, “Now and then it is necessary to replace the control rods because they become transmuted into metals that have too little absorption factor. To get rid of them on a spaceport would mean the trouble of disposing of quite a bit of metal that is dangerously radioactive. So we take the convenient method of tossing them out in space where they can’t harm anything.”

  “But where do they land?” she asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not at all. We use discretion. Look. In a few hours we will be halfway to Pluto. Our velocity will be tremendous because we have been accelerating ail the way from Mercury. To land on Pluto we’ll have to make a turn-over at halfway and start decelerating. If I wanted to replace control rods, I’d do it just before turn-over. The velocity of the ship and the rods would be a good many times the escape velocity of the entire solar system, so the rods would continue on and on, and actually they’d pass out of the solar system beyond Pluto in a matter of hours. Long before we got there.”

  “But supposing one did land on Terra, for instance?”

  “It would make an interesting looking meteorite; it would melt in midair. Then the total radioactivity would spread thin and do no damage.”

  She was satisfied, and Farradyne led her back to the salon.

  For the first time in years Farradyne began to feel at ease with the universe. His mind, previously busy with his main problem, found time to consider other things. And, like the rest of the spaceman breed, Farradyne was something of a gadgeteer.

  Spacing, in a sense, was very much like the manning of a sailing ship of the nineteenth century. When something needed attention, in space it was during maneuver for landing, take-off, or turn-over; on sea it was coming about on a tack or setting sail, a full-time attention was necessary. Between periods of activity, the spaceman sat on his duff and waited for one of the silent twinkles to detach itself from the stellar curtain above his observation dome and become a planet or destination.

  Some spacemen reverted to the point where they built spacecraft in old bottles, others spent their time in tinkering.

  Farradyne had always been one of the latter. And so as his mind felt at ease, he began to tinker with the gear down in the repair shop. It was a small room below the passenger section hardly large enough to hold the machinery it contained. But Farradyne, like many of his fellows, enjoyed making things, repairing things and generally experimenting. Every spaceman hoped to come up with something that would make him rich and famous, and some of them had done it. They had plenty of time, a good grasp of things scientific as well as manual dexterity.

  So Farradyne tinkered happily.

  The shop was silent; the usual milling around of his passengers stopped as they went to bed. Now there was only the occasional groan of metal-upon-metal or the faint whine as a motor somewhere wound up to do some automatic job. The click and clack of relays were just barely audible; they would have been unheard by someone whose training had been other than that of a spaceman. In the background was the muted sibilant of the reaction motor, a sound like the shush of a distant seashore. Farradyne heard these sounds unconsciously. They were as pleasant to the ears of the spaceman as the sounds of a sailing ship were to the oldtime seaman.

  But another faint sound came to disturb him, rising up into the level of audibility very slowly.

  It was a ringing in Farradyne’s ears.

  Ringing in the ears can come from too much alcohol, or a shot of dope, or a slap on the side of the head. Or a change in air-pressure. Farradyne had not been drinking nor taking the needle, but he had spent many years in an environment where the supply of air was important. He had become oversensitive to it. He sniffed automatically, the gesture of a man who has reason to suspect the quality of the air he is breathing. He shook his head. He did feel a bit light-headed. There was the bare trifle of a dull pain above his eyes and a sting in his nose. He sneezed and brought forth a dribble of blood.

  Farradyne raced aloft; he could settle nothing standing in the workshop. The bulkhead door between the hold of the Lancaster and the passengers’ section was closed. He pushed it and it opened with slight difficulty to let a blow of air hit his face. He grunted in puzzlement. Any change in air-pressure in any part of the shop should have started a clangor of the puncture alarm, a racket loud enough to waken the dead.

  He went through the stateroom corridor and listened carefully as he went. Some rooms were silent and others sounded like the song of the cross-cut saw working its way through a burl of maple. There were gradations of snores between these extremes. Nothing that a suspicious man could put his finger on. He did not pause in the salon, which was silent and darkened, but not completely black. There was nothing out of the way here.

  In fact the only thing that was out of line was the queer fact that the ship was silent when the alarm should have been sounding. He went up to the control room.

  Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of some long-forgotten genius that had insisted that whenever possible, warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable and should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal cutting tools made the exception to the “whenever possible” part of the design of warning signals.

  The ship’s bell-system had been opened like a tin can.

  But the pilot lamp system was strung here and there behind the panels and it would have taken a major overhaul to ruin it; the saboteur would have spent all night opening cans instead of doing his dirty work. Farradyne should have been asleep, then he would not have noticed the blaze of lamps.

  They told him the tale in a glance. The low-pressure portion of the ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low, and now that Farradyne had come aloft, the pressure in the upper levels was as low as the reaction-mass bay. As he watched, another one of the scuttle ports swung open and its warning lamp flared into life.

  Farradyne went into action. He ripped open the cabinet that held his space-suit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps, jumps and pauses. He realized that he could have moved faster if he stopped to do one thing at a time, but his frantic mind would not permit him to make haste slowly. So he stumbled and he fell against the walls, and the tanks of his back rapped against his shoulder-blades, and the helmet cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose. Luckily it did not make him bleed, but it hurt like the very devil.

  He zipped up the airtight clotures by the time he reached the little workshop and he ducked in there to get a weapon of some sort. He reached past the hammer, ignored the obvious chisel because it was not heavy enough, even though it was sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch half-round woodworking rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it felt about right.

  The air-break on the topside was open, and Farradyne closed it He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, and to check the workings of the space-suit. He also located the cause of the air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stopped, his attention attracted by this trifle of evidence. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book and used to light a cigarette for Mrs. Logan a good many hours before.

  He threw it aside and went in, his attention once more on the important business before him. He ran along the curved corridor. And there, a figure in a space-suit was quietly levering one of the control rods out of its slot and preparing to hurl it into the void.

  Farradyne understood the whole act in that one glance; it was the sort of thing that he would do if sabotage were his intention. The single scuttle-port had been opened first by hand. Then the saboteur had scuttled the
stock of spare control rods, and since the Lancaster was reasonably new, there had been quite a batch of them. Furthermore they were long, unwieldy, heavy things that took time to handle. Naturally this was the first act, because the next act would cause the ship’s acceleration to rise. The rise in acceleration would make the rods too heavy to carry and would also cause investigation as soon as people became aware of the increasing pressure.

  Then the working rods would be hurled out, leaving the ship heading toward some anonymous star at about eight gravities of acceleration. The passengers and crew would be helpless—and dead long before they got within any appreciable fraction of a distance to any planet.

  Maybe two or three of the rods had been scuttled already. The rest, functioning on the automatic, would have been shoved in farther to compensate; Farradyne could feel no change in the acceleration pressure. But once the working rods were all the way home, the removal of the next would cause the ship to take off, literally with the throttle tied down. Farradyne was willing to bet the rest of his life that the safety-valve that furnished the water-mass to the pile was either welded open or damaged in such a way that the supply could not be stopped.

  Then—and Farradyne had to admire the vandal’s precautions—he would make his way to the escape hatch and let the helpless passengers go on … and on …

  Victims of another case of “Lost in Space.”

  The saboteur was well prepared. His suit was a high efficiency job capable of maintaining a man alive for a long time in space. It had a little radio for calling and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering, even though it would not be strong enough to permit planetary landing. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there, who would pick him up.

  A parcel of ice-cold-blooded murderers.

  Farradyne saw the man through a red haze that clouded down over his eyes. His evaluation of the act was made in a glance, and in the bare instant that it took for Farradyne to see the man he got his feet in motion. He plunged forward with a bellow that hurt his own ears.

  10

  The man whirled and sent a heavy-gloved hand back against Farradyne’s face glass. Farradyne lifted the file for a second swing and caught the gleam of a heavy knife just as it swung upward at his face. The blade jabbed at the face glass and blunted slightly before Farradyne’s eyes, splintering the glass and sending a shard or two against his cheek. Farradyne’s second swing caught a shoulder and sent the man staggering back; the knife came up and the gleaming edge sliced close to Farradyne’s arm. The man stumbled and fell, and Farradyne came forward to take advantage of the opportunity. The long lever used to handle the radioactive control rod chopped against Farradyne’s shins and cut his feet out from under him; he landed on his face and the other man kicked out with heavy space boots. The heels rammed Farradyne’s helmet hard down into his shoulders, and the top of his helmet hit the top of Farradyne’s head, stunning him.

  The other scrambled forward and landed on Farradyne’s back. He pulled up and back on the fittings of Farradyne’s helmet until the pilot’s spine ached with the tension. Then the man thrust forward and slammed Farradyne’s face down on the deck. The splintered safety glass cracked further and there came the thin, high screech of air escaping through a sharp-edged hole.

  Farradyne lashed out and around just in time to parry a slash of the knife. Blade met file in a glint of metal-spark and both weapons were shocked out of the gloved hands to go skittering across the deck.

  The man left Farradyne to scramble across the floor after his knife. Farradyne jumped to his feet, took three fast steps and leaped, coming down with both feet on the man’s back. The other collapsed and Farradyne fell, turning his right wrist underneath him. The other made a kick that caught Farradyne in the side, turning him over. And as Farradyne rolled, the bent hand touched metal and he came out of the roll clutching a heavy pair of repair pliers. He could cut bolts with them, and had.

  He faced the killer, standing again; armed again, spaceman’s pliers against assassin’s knife. He plunged forward and felt the knife bite against his suit, he swung the pliers as a club and caught the killer’s upper arm; he opened the jaws and bit down, twisting and pulling.

  A three-cornered tear ripped and came away with the point between the jaws until the heavy outer cloth gave way. The knife came up and bit through Farradyne’s suit across the knuckles of the hand that held the pliers. Farradyne kicked, sent the killer staggering and followed him probing at the tear to get at the thin inner suit. The other man struggled, hurled Farradyne back, but Farradyne staggered back with the thin lining between the jaws of the pliers. The suit ripped and there came a puff of white vapor as the air blew into the void.

  The struggling killer stopped as though shocked by an electric current; he stood there stiffly, his hands slowly falling to his sides, limp. Farradyne took a step back, breathing hard. He could see now that his head was not jerked back and forth behind the cracked glass. He peered, in time to watch the froth of blood foam out of Hughes’ nose.

  Hughes! The math professor. The wise guy who had created the part of dumb bunny by making sounds of knowing too much, who pretended to know his way around in space.

  Farradyne wondered whether Hughes had cried out in a polytonal voice—then he hauled him into the air break and slammed the door shut. He felt for a pulse and found one fluttering; he turned him on his face and pumped the ribs in, out, in, out, wondering whether he was wasting his time.

  Hughes groaned painfully. His groans echoed and reechoed in the tiny space, but Farradyne could not hear more than the wreaking moan of a man hurt very deeply. Hughes stirred and opened one eye. Then he closed it again and sobbed under his breath. Farradyne checked the heart and found it beating weakly; the pulse was not fluttering any more, and the breath was coming naturally, even though the man’s chest heaved high and dropped low and there was a foghorn sound in the throat as he gasped huge lungfuls of air.

  Whatever, Hughes would give Farradyne no trouble for some time. Farradyne carried the unconscious man to his stateroom and dropped him on the bed. Then he went below and closed the little hatches, reinserted the control rod, and wondered whether missing a few would louse up his landing.

  He went up to the control room and replaced the wiring torn out of the audible-alarm system. The phalanx of warning lamps had winked out and the clangor of the alarm did not come.

  Farradyne went back to Hughes; the man was in a semicoma.

  “Can you hear me?” demanded Farradyne.

  Hughes roused slightly and looked at Farradyne through heavy eyes, mumbling unintelligibly.

  “You dirty louse!” fumed Farradyne. “I’d have let you die if it hadn’t occurred to me that you might be good for some information. What makes, Hughes? Or should we have an accident below?”

  Hughes mumbled something that sounded like defiance.

  “Think your friends will give you a raise for this fumble?” jeered Farradyne.

  Hughes roused a bit more and looked at Farradyne more directly. “Smart guy,” he said in a toneless voice, “you can’t—”

  Farradyne smiled cynically. “Yes, I can and I have,” he snapped. Then he leaned down and put his face close to Hughes’ and said carefully, “Hughes, sing me a trio.”

  Hughes’ control was good. His eyes widened only a sliver and the catch in his breath was faint; anybody not watching for these signs of sudden alarm would not have noticed anything amiss. Then the eyes dimmed again and Hughes said, weakly, “Sing nothing.”

  “What’s your pitch, Hughes?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The hell you don’t,” said Farradyne harshly. “And if you won’t talk without it, I can make you yelp real loud. First I break all your fingers, one by one, and then your toes, and then if you’re still playing stupid, there’s always the trick of slipping a soldering iron under your armpit and then plugging it in. Between the time the current goes on and the time you really star
t to feel it burn should be long enough to make a lot of gab.”

  Hughes looked at Farradyne directly. “You’d better kill me,” he said flatly. “Because you can’t hold me.”

  “I’ll make you a bet,” sneered Farradyne. “I’ll bet that I can hang onto you, and if I do, you’ll pay off by talking. Even-steven, Hughes.”

  Farradyne went to his small medicine chest and came back with a hypodermic, which he loaded with deliberation. He made a dramatic scene out of pushing the plunger, watching the droplet form on the end of the needle and then adjusting that dose against the scale on the side of the cylinder.

  “Marcoleptine,” he said conversationally. “A fine painkiller, Hughes. Just the thing a man would do to help a very ill comrade. It’ll keep you quiet until we can discuss the situation without having your screams disturbing the passengers. Slip me your arm, old man. This won’t hurt much.”

  Hughes mouthed a curse, but Farradyne paid no more attention to the man’s objections than he would have to the objections of a child. Farradyne caught Hughes’ wrist and brought the man’s hand up under his armpit, then braced his forearm under Hughes’ elbow. Then he lifted an arm-bar, which raised Hughes’ shoulder from the cot; Farradyne slid the needle into the elbow easily with his free arm, probed for the vein and discharged the hypodermic.

  “I wonder,” mused Farradyne aloud, “whether marcoleptine is really non-habit-forming.” He sat there on the edge of the bed watching Hughes very carefully. Hughes struggled to keep his eyes wide, fighting off the narcotic But then the eyelids grew heavier and started to close.

  In a weakened, drugged voice, Hughes mumbled, “Easier to slip under—now—can’t do anything—will …” and he was gone. His breathing grew regular and his body was completely flaccid. Farradyne waited until Hughes was well under the dope and then he stopped watching the man critically and began to plan his next move.